The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  “Oh… well, Jane… it’s Christmas. It’s a celebration. I have all kinds of things for tomorrow.” But she said this to Jane without turning to look at her, and she remained still and pensive as she looked out at the snow-encrusted parking lot. Finally she drew herself together and started the car, but she was not as brisk as she had been, and she was short-tempered with Jane for the rest of the afternoon.

  By Christmas morning, though, her optimism had returned. In fact, she was giddy with what was partly terror at coming into the kitchen and seeing evidence everywhere of the risk she had taken. In the refrigerator and spread over the table were the makings of an event, and that was Avery’s domain; she had taken a plunge into improvisation.

  “We won’t open any of the presents until your father gets here,” she said to Jane. “Is that all right with you, Janie? And your main present was the violin, but I know there’ll be a few surprises.” Jane kept her eyes on the TV and only nodded, and Claudia wandered off.

  Jane’s idea of Christmas was her collective memory of all the ones before, and always her parents—especially her father—constructed it out of the most fragile material, constructed it out of his own enthusiasm, which was infectious and irresistible. For weeks before Christmas Avery would come home with mysterious boxes, and as early as August, Claudia would begin to pore over catalogues. By late November and December the UPS man would be making almost daily stops. Every year that Jane could remember, however, it had become too much for Claudia. Her mother would share her father’s enthusiasm, but she also could not bear the idea of Jane’s suspense. She would waylay Jane in private with this or that sealed box and furtively slit the brown tape.

  “I’ve just got to show you this, Janie! It’s magnificent. I know how awful it is to have to wait.” And Jane could remember over the years that her mother had once drawn forth and unfurled from her tissue paper a spectacular doll from Sweden. A doll unlike any other Jane had ever seen, a somber-faced, stalwart, brave-hearted doll. Once her mother had let her examine all the intricacies of a two-foot-tall simulated wooden tree trunk from F.A.O. Schwarz that was cleverly hinged and opened into the most perfectly furnished home for a family of Steiff mice. “Your father would be furious if he knew I let you see this, but I can’t stand it for you—not knowing. But you have to act really surprised when you open it Christmas morning.” Another year she had led Jane down to the cellar on the sly to let her see the amazing old-fashioned carnival in miniature that Avery had found on one of his expeditions around the countryside. It consisted of an enameled Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and airplane ride that all spun around in remarkable synchronization, just missing each other as they whirled. Avery had located an artist who had reconditioned it and a jeweler who had fitted into its platform the workings of a music box, so that while all the little rides circled and circled it played “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”

  Christmas was wonderful in her household; it was magical, but it was also a day through which the hours followed one another with increasing dependency. It was a day made of glass, and one small fissure early-on could etch its way through the whole structure until finally the entire fabrication might shatter around their ears.

  When Avery did arrive about eleven o’clock, he had an armful of gifts that he put around the tree. Jane didn’t move away from the television, although she did turn her face up to her father when he came in to greet her and give her a kiss. He was looking frail and drawn and dry like paper. When Avery wasn’t drinking anything at all for long stretches, his irritation was visible and rather attractive. He assumed an aggressively disheveled look. Perhaps he had shaved much earlier that morning, but perhaps it had not been since the night before. He had on an old green sweater that was transparent at one elbow and rumpled jeans, and he wore an expression of a man vexed at being distracted from doing or saying some important thing. The whole attitude was peculiarly suited to his rangy build and slightly misaligned features, and he carried himself rigidly as though he were just a little sore all over.

  When he made another trip outside, Claudia came in and was upset and frankly irritated at Jane. “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “You’re really being a wet blanket. You’ll hurt your father’s feelings.” Claudia’s voice was hushed, as though she didn’t want Avery to hear her, even though he was outside. And Jane understood that when her mother spoke in that terse undertone, whatever suggestion she made was an imperative. So Jane did get up, trailing the blanket she was using as a robe, and moved to the living room, where she settled dourly on the couch, and Claudia followed her.

  “For God’s sake, Jane! You could get dressed! I asked you to get dressed!” She turned away from Jane and was suddenly anxious rather than cross. “Don’t ruin this.” She stood for a moment looking out at Avery and opening and closing her hands by her sides; then she turned back to Jane once more, and she was angry again. “God, it’s depressing to have you dragging around like this. You could be that considerate of your father. And of me. It’s Christmas. You can’t stay like that in those raggy pajamas!”

  Jane’s loyalties and the affections of her whole lifetime were frozen on this particular Christmas morning, and she wanted no part of anything Claudia was saying. She didn’t answer at all. Claudia just stood there in the center of the room, and then she turned her attention back to Avery, who was approaching the house with an armload of wood. As her mother moved forward to open the door, Jane’s attention was suddenly riveted to her. All her senses were alerted.

  No one else would have heard her mother’s footsteps on the pale rug unless, like Jane, he or she watched Claudia’s feet as they left a soft impression on the plush pile in their delicate sling-back suede shoes. But Jane heard the heels of the shoes smack softly against her mother’s sheerly stockinged feet in the smallest sound of flesh and leather. As her father came in with the wood, and her mother moved forward to close the door—just as her two parents passed each other—Jane was astonished momentarily to see her mother so sinuous and silky, somehow insinuating in contrast with her father’s efficient conservation of movement. No grace there, today, but a lean elegance that was entirely masculine. Jane was struck by her mother’s fragile ankles and slim legs beneath the full skirt that flicked around her knees. She noticed the curve of her mother’s bust and waist, and the absurd puffed shoulders of the tapered sleeves of her velvet dress. Jane was embarrassed, and filled with some other discomfort for which she had no name, to see that her mother was physically so frivolous, so useless to a winter’s day. And when her mother spoke to her father, it made Jane cringe to hear the subtle modulation, the slight, soft lilt that was both condescending, somehow, and gratingly deferential.

  Avery set about building a fire in the fireplace, and the labor suited him. As he knelt on one knee to crumple paper and arrange the wood, Claudia glanced over at him from across the room where she was sitting on the edge of the couch. His mood was amiable but edged with a sort of accusatory fretfulness, and it was powerfully erotic to Claudia. He exuded an air of modest suffering, and she knew exactly how that slight petulance resolved itself in slow and deliberate lovemaking that would begin with a selfish insistence on his part, so at first she would respond a little and then become irritated and aloof. Finally the two of them would become absolutely aware of the other one in lazy, self-indulgent sex that would be so leisurely and slightly grudging of the other that it would have a sullen and rather dangerous quality about it. She was so absorbed in watching him that she was not breathing for a moment, and she caught herself and got up and redirected her attention to the gifts and their arrangement around the tree.

  “I’m going to get some champagne for all of us,” she said. “I’ve got wonderful things for brunch. I’ll fix a tray.”

  Avery was trying to get the fire to light, and he didn’t turn around. “Not anything for me. I can’t stay too long. Alice is fixing a special dinner.” The fire would not ignite, and he didn’t see Claudia stop on her way to the kitchen,
for a second, like a puppet with every string drawn taut in mid-motion. But she moved forward again without comment. When she returned with the tray, however, there were three glasses of wine and three plates of heated streusel. All she did was put it down on the small table she had placed by the tree, and she didn’t call it to Avery’s attention when the three of them sat down on the floor to open their gifts. He took a plate and a glass without even thinking about it, and he also began to come out of his air of being put upon. Claudia made several trips to the kitchen until finally she had laid out a feast on the table before them. Avery sat down across from her and began to cajole Jane, who was still huddled in her blanket, still dressed in her pajamas. He held out a small rectangular present to her.

  “Listen,” he said to her, “I know that we usually don’t give practical kinds of things for presents, but you’ve gotten so old now that I knew you’d be tired of playthings.” He looked worried for a minute. “You don’t already have an electric toothbrush, do you?” He handed the present across to her, and she tried to smile at him when she unwrapped it. It was an antique amethyst and pearl locket; the amethyst was her birthstone, and she meant to ask him where he had found it, because he took great pleasure in unearthing these amazing presents. She meant to tell him that it was beautiful, but she was terribly tired. In fact, it seemed to her that it was the day itself that embodied exhaustion. She felt that it was a day that had already happened so that the minutes were sticky with previous events and unnaturally slow to pass. The day had happened, but not in any mysterious or thrilling way that allowed her the wondrous sense of déjà vu. It was not at all intriguing; what lay ahead was a long, flat sheet of hours that had been worn-out. So Jane held the locket in her hand and then put it away in its box and put the box down beside her. She hadn’t even remembered to say thank you, although both her parents waited anxiously. And both Avery and Claudia took her seeming sullenness as a repudiation of themselves. But they didn’t say anything. They moved on to other gifts.

  Claudia kept the glasses filled with champagne as they opened the beautiful packages. When she was handed a gift, she would trade the box from hand to hand, nervously strip off some of the paper, and then jump up to get something else from the kitchen, “You open one while I get the pâté.” She didn’t like to receive gifts, but Avery and Jane always gave her things, anyway. This year Jane gave her a tea rose weekender set she had ordered from the Bloomingdale’s catalogue and put on her mother’s charge. Jane was a master of 800 numbers and the American Express card. It was how she shopped for most of the gifts she gave.

  Claudia thanked her in flight; she opened the package and exclaimed over it after she had put it down and was moving through the kitchen door trailing words behind her. “… exactly like roses… lovely.”

  But Avery had found such a perfect present that when Claudia came back into the room and opened it, it held her right to the spot. She was standing as she peeled away the paper, but she settled down on the rug immediately. With immense satisfaction she leafed through the dozen or more record albums she had unwrapped.

  “God! Where did you get these? My God, Danny and the Juniors! Oh, and, Avery, look at this! The Platters. This isn’t even a copy, is it? I mean, these are the real records. Bobby Blue Bland. And you found an Ink Spots album. This is incredible! Leslie Gore. She was so wonderfully awful. The Shirelles! Where’d you ever find these? I was in… what… seventh grade? You must have been in ninth. Were you still in junior high? Where in the world did you find these?”

  “If you watch the late shows on television,” Avery said. “They’re advertised right along with the Ginsu knives and the single-hand ratchet. The same number to call, too. ‘Call right now before our limited supplies run out!’ I couldn’t resist them. They probably are copies of the originals. The sound won’t be very good. I think the copyrights run out, and—”

  Claudia interrupted him; she hadn’t really been listening. “Look at this, Avery! The Penguins. Oh, God, here’s ‘Earth Angel,’ and look, The Platters. ‘Twilight Time.’”

  Avery was animated, too, and pleased. He sat up and rocked back and forth dramatically as he assumed an exaggerated and tremulous falsetto and sang:

  Heavenly shades of night are falling,

  It’s twilight time.

  Deep in the dusk your voice is calling,

  It’s twilight time….

  “No, that’s not right,” Claudia said. “What is it? Not ‘deep in the dusk.’ I don’t think so. Let’s play them. Let’s put them on now.”

  Jane was unsettled by this new development, by all this goodwill. And she was strangely hurt and jealous. “You were probably just drunk when you ordered them,” she said suddenly. “I’ve seen those ads. They come on real late. I bet you were just drunk.”

  Her parents looked at her with utterly blank faces. In this household over the years the one thing that no one ever said when Avery was sober was that Avery was ever drunk. It would be a vile, cruel, and harmful idea to hold out in the light. Avery sometimes said that he had been through a rough time. Sometimes he had been working too hard. Quite often he apologized for having been depressed. But they didn’t ever say that Avery was drunk, and it displeased Claudia more than Avery. She stood up in astonishment and was too surprised to say anything right away.

  “Jane! What are you doing? Why would you say something like that? Avery went all over the county to antique stores to find that locket for you….” She had no idea in the world why Jane seemed determined to make them all unhappy.

  Everything about Avery signified unexpected injury. He was pained, but all the more benevolent. Far be it from him to take offense, and he behaved as if Jane had not said a word, except that in everything he did there was a little hesitancy. He quickly fell into the role of being in the house on sufferance, careful not to make a misstep.

  He settled back into his comfortable position on the rug, leaning against the table with his drink in his hand. “Janie, I think that at least you ought to open that big present right there,” he said. He leaned forward to push the large box toward Jane, who sat like an Indian beneath her blanket with its edges draped over her forearms and her forearms wrapped around herself as she kept an eagle eye on her parents. She looked at the box in front of her with no enthusiasm. To have attacked her father left her feeling as brittle and hollowed-out as a winter-dried reed in the meadow.

  For a few moments she made no move at all, and when this registered on Claudia, who was still bewildered, she looked over at Jane slowly. Claudia had picked up two records and had been studying the backs of the album covers because she was so unnerved. Now she said to Jane, “Is there some reason you want to ruin this day?”

  “Oh, Claudia, leave it alone,” Avery began in an apologetic tone, a man contrite, but she didn’t pause.

  “Your father has gone to a lot of trouble for you. What’s in that box is really a special present. I don’t know why you’re so sulky. Why don’t you go on and open it?” Jane knew that there was tremendous anger in her mother’s intention that was withheld from the rigidly civilized tone of her reprimand. In response she felt a great welling up of fury at once again being treated like a child by her own mother. She didn’t make any comment at all but removed the plaid taffeta bow and the glossy green paper while her parents huddled over the box to admire the gift. It was an elaborate stereo tape and phonograph component system. Avery had been looking into it for some time, he said, and he thought he had come up with the best of the best. He had put the package together from several sources. And Jane watched him as he removed the various pieces from the box with the same care with which he had handled the Celestron telescope a long time ago. These mechanical things, so precise and carefully rendered, they fascinated him, and he talked about advanced technology, tone, the clarification of sound, and so forth. Jane thanked him, but he wasn’t really aiming his comments at her or Claudia; he was simply entertaining himself.

  “Avery, let’s play these records
. Can we play them on that machine right now?”

  “I’ve got to get it set up. I’m going to set it up in Janie’s room, but I’ve got two speakers for the living room, too, that can be switched on or off. It should give us a much better sound than the stereo we’ve got. And Jane can record herself practicing and then play it back. Or she can use it to play the practice tapes that Alice makes for her. Alice thinks that it would be great for Jane to play along with the practice tapes. It’s the way Alice gets ready for her performances or auditions. But she doesn’t get a very pure sound on her machine.”

  He took the several parts of the gift upstairs and came back to get tools from the storage closet and a stepladder from the garage. “These wires can be hidden if I tack them with brackets along the baseboards and the doorsills. It won’t take very long.”

  Claudia had become silent again, and when Avery disappeared back up the stairs, she took a meringue from the tray and settled down on the other end of the couch from Jane, tucking her legs beneath her voluminous skirt and taking a bite of the meringue. She ate it slowly, letting each small bit melt a little in her mouth, then nibbling at the piece in her hand and musing.

  “Does Avery come to your lessons at Alice’s?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Sometimes he’s there. He usually brings me home, you know.”

  “But, I mean, does he stay for the whole lesson? Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  Jane didn’t answer. She was trying to concentrate on looking through the books her mother had given her. The Anne of Green Gables series, which Jane had taken out of the library and read two years ago. The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, and a book about the lives of the composers. It was an odd lot.