The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  “Janie,” Claudia said, and Jane glanced at her in acknowledgment and then continued to leaf through the pages of the books.

  “This thing with Alice. What do you think?” Her voice was not angry now; it was confidential and fairly reflective. “Do you think that Avery might have missed a time in his life when it would have been natural for him to have some sort of sexual interest in boys?” Her words dwindled off with that thought, and she sat with part of another meringue growing sticky in her hand. “I mean, we were always with each other. Maybe he missed some part of development in childhood, or something. Alice… well, haven’t you always thought of Alice as sort of neuter? Do you think Avery might be gay? Trying it out maybe? Or trying not to try it out? Alice is almost like a young boy.” Claudia really wanted to know what Jane thought. “He has those graduate students who sort of fawn over him. Oh, and that one… what’s his name?… well, I always thought he had a crush on your father.”

  There was no hint of judgment in what Claudia was saying, but Jane was trying not to hear her mother. She was intently studying the book in her lap. Claudia’s question was more than she could consider. She concentrated so diligently on the pages before her that she didn’t quite allow her mother’s voice to penetrate her senses.

  “I’m very fond of Alice, of course,” Claudia added, as if that explained something.

  “We haven’t finished opening the presents yet,” Jane said, and her mother turned to look at her but didn’t respond one way or another. Claudia’s mind was no longer on Christmas.

  The room was very warm with the heat from the fireplace, and outside the day had begun to cloud over and come in closer. When Avery came downstairs to set up the speakers, Claudia got up to turn on the lights. Avery had switched from champagne to scotch, and he looked less haggard. His color was back across his cheekbones, and he had assumed the guarded expression of careful irony that always masked his face after he had had a certain amount to drink. He was cheerful as he fitted the speakers into the bookcases, and Claudia had more champagne. Avery went upstairs to put on one of Claudia’s new records. When he came down again, Claudia had slipped off her suede heels and was standing by the stairs, swaying with excessive and campy zeal to the music:

  Tell Laura I love her,

  Tell Laura I care.

  Tell Laura not to cry….

  “You have to take off your shoes, too,” she said to him. “Why didn’t we ever get to dance anywhere where we could keep our shoes on?”

  Avery handed Claudia his drink and sat down on the stairs to take his shoes off, and he stood up and reached to take his glass back from her, but she backed up a bit, holding both of her arms up toward him.

  “No, this is the basic slow dance. A clutch.” And she moved forward and crossed her wrists behind his neck, still holding the glass of scotch in one hand. He was enough taller than she so that for a moment she seemed to be suspended from him, arched upward with her breasts grazing his chest and her hair falling back away from her face while he hesitated, standing up straight at the foot of the stairs. Jane saw a fractional change come over his face. His mouth relaxed at the corners just a little, and his whole face lost its irony and took on a secretive, closed-down expression. He reached down to hold Claudia around the waist, and bending his knees slightly, he inclined his torso forward to meet her body which canted backward so that she was scooped into his leaning form. Neither of them laughed, although they had meant to be silly.

  Jane was stunned. She had opened all sorts of presents, and now she saw that her life was not changed in any way, nor was her future enhanced. She was sitting behind a great jumble of wrapping paper and boxes across from her parents, who fitted so naturally together to do this dance. She looked dead ahead at Avery and Claudia and understood that in spite of every single thing, nothing was ever going to change between them. She felt her muscles growing rigid in that same semiparalysis that made her movements awkward and that restrained her speech. But she did say very loudly, “We haven’t finished opening the presents!”

  Then her father straightened a little and made an elaborate parody of their dancing, dipping and swaying, and their two forms seemed to lose some force that had been bearing down upon them.

  Jane had a lot more presents to open, but they were just this and that. A scrapbook from Diana, a set of oil pastels from Maggie, and Avery had a good bit more scotch, and Claudia finished the champagne.

  Finally Avery got around to opening his present from Jane, which she had also ordered from Bloomingdale’s. He took off the gift wrap and then leaned back to look at the box. It was the medium-size model of the Cuisinart.

  “Very handy,” he said. He had had enough scotch so that he fell into a sort of mocking banter, and he pitched his voice to mimic a shill. “Mounds of julienne potatoes in minutes! Chop onions without tears! And look! This a-ma-zing machine will even slice tomatoes paper-thin!” He sipped his drink and became a bit more gracious in deference to his daughter. “No, Janie. No, it’s very thoughtful. Very thoughtful.”

  Her mother was staring at her, though, and she said very carefully and very quietly, “Jane, we already have a Cuisinart.”

  Jane was red in the face with some powerful and unfocused rage by now. She could scarcely speak, her mouth had become so rigid.

  “We have one, but Dad doesn’t have one. He’s always coming over to use ours.”

  Claudia stood up slowly, pushing her skirt into place with the open palms of her hands and leaving little trails in the dark velvet where she had brushed the plush fabric against the grain. She could not understand why Jane would betray her like this. She walked a few steps away toward the window but then stopped and stood still, idly kneading the fold of her skirt with one hand.

  “Alice doesn’t have one either,” Jane said.

  Her father assumed a faintly sardonic grin.

  Claudia released her skirt and opened her hands out into the air in helplessness. She held her empty palms outstretched for a moment, then dropped them to her sides. She had been content to be an observer for most of her life, but now she was filled with a slightly drunken and passionate indignation.

  “I want to know about this thing with Alice,” Claudia said without turning around. “I always keep thinking that people are my friends.”

  “Aha!” Avery said. “That’s it! That’s just the way you would think. Why would anything between me and Alice have anything—anything at all—to do with you?” Avery had that dangerous note to his voice, a nasty edge of distorted self-pity, and when Jane watched him uncoil from the floor and stand over her mother, she felt sick with all the memory of old fear plus the real thing, immediate anxiety.

  “As a matter of fact,” Avery said from behind Claudia, “Alice doesn’t much like you. She thinks that you don’t have ‘any purpose in life,’ as she puts it. A leech on civilization. Of course, Alice is awfully stern.” And thinking about it made him laugh a little.

  “You know what, Avery? I’m so tired,” and her mother’s voice rose. “I’m so fucking tired of fools. Of little twits and fools. I think Alice is like one of those dolls you buy in the store. No humor. No sex. Just long hair that you can comb into different styles. ‘Not anatomically correct’ is how they print it on the boxes. Is that right, Avery? Is that right? No one you’d really want to fuck, but someone to believe in you? I’m getting awfully tired—”

  But Avery grabbed her from behind and held one of her arms in back of her and covered her mouth with his other hand.

  “Oh, Christ! Shut up! You never know when to shut up!” And it was such a perfect little domed house to exacerbate their burgeoning anger. Their own voices were scooped by the warming air currents out of the curves and corners, bounced off the glass, and thrown back at their own ears to infuriate them further.

  Jane had leaped up off the couch, and her face was grotesque with alarm. “Stop it! Stop it!” She threw herself on her father’s arm that was clasped over the lower part of her mother’s face, a
nd she pulled it away, screaming at them both. “Stop it! I can’t stand it! Not anymore! Not anymore! Stop it!”

  But as soon as Claudia was free to speak again, she turned toward Avery as far as she could with her arm still pinned behind her back.

  “You’re a spoiled brat! A baby! A baby!” she yelled at Avery. “I’ve known it all my life! I’ve put up with it forever! Even your mother warned me! And you know what I think! I think you’re a borderline narcissist!”

  Avery pushed her away from him so hard that she stumbled forward and fell down on one knee.

  “You think that! You think that! You goddamned solipsistic bitch. You don’t even have the remotest—not the faintest idea that there’s a world out there!” He was leaning forward and shouting at Claudia as she scrambled to her feet, and the tendons in his neck stood out. “Who’s the chancellor of West Germany?” he shouted straight into her face as she turned to meet him.

  “Stop it! Stop it! Please stop it!” And Jane was yelling, too. Trying to get between them.

  Claudia was beside herself with fury now, and she shook both of her clenched fists at him. “Stupid! Stupid questions! Don’t ask me such stupid questions! What is it? Have you forgotten how to be honest? You can’t even be honest in an argument, can you? You won’t even talk about the things that really make you mad. How do you feel about what you do, Avery? How do you feel about women? You can hardly talk about your own mother!” And her voice had fallen into a loud and persistent taunt.

  “And you cannot tell me who is the chancellor of West Germany! Who is it? Who is it? Have you even read a paper in the past year, or have you been too busy brooding about… Christ!… whatever it is you brood about?” All of a sudden he grabbed Claudia by the shoulders and shook her back and forth while Jane yelled and yelled at them.

  “Who cares who it is? Don’t touch me! Don’t you touch me, you son of a bitch! You stupid bastard! You’re an asshole of a graduate student brat! You’ve never changed! Nothing you can think of is as important as I am! As anyone is!”

  Avery moved in closer to her, pulling her forward, so that she was standing on tiptoe, almost not touching the ground at all. “You never listen. You never even listen. You tell me… you tell me right now, who is the chancellor of West Germany?”

  Jane began picking up the empty gift boxes that were strewn around the room and pelting Avery and Claudia with them. She threw the sturdy cardboard boxes with all her might. One hit Avery in the temple, and he released Claudia with one hand to protect his head. Both of her parents raised their elbows around their heads as Jane threw at them anything she could pick up, all the while screaming at them to stop. “Get out! Get out!” She threw an ashtray, her mother’s cigarettes, which shot out of the pack in every direction like white darts. “Why do you come back all the time? Just get out! Get out!”

  Avery lurched forward at her and roared as if he had been wounded. “God damn you! You get out! We can’t even have any privacy! You think everything is your business. We’ve knocked ourselves out for you this Christmas, and you’ve acted like a spoiled little rich bitch all day! God knows what you’ve been telling the Tunbridges about our private life, but Maggie’s worried as hell about you. Says you never even leave the house. Here’s your chance! Leave it! I’d like to see how sympathetic Maggie is after she’s spent a little time with you. Who are you to judge me! Or your mother! Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Jane stood her ground in fury; her father had never laid a hand on her. She wasn’t afraid he would hurt her. “No, you get out!” she said. “You left! Why can’t you stay away? All that ever happens when you come over is that you get mad. You ruin everything. You get out!”

  And then Claudia turned on her, too. “This is your father’s house! How can you say those things to him?” Her mother was very loud, but also plaintive. “You’ve upset everybody today. Everybody! We were having a nice day except for you! You don’t care about the trouble we went to about your violin! You don’t care about the trouble your father went to to find that locket! I don’t know… I don’t know if you care about anything at all, about anybody but yourself! God, I wish I’d never had you! I wish I had never, never had you!”

  Claudia and Avery were so engrossed in their own rage and the drama of it and the morbid thrill of saying the very worst that could be said that Avery didn’t even notice that he was being defended, and Claudia had no idea that what she had said would not only be believed forever after, but would never be forgotten. Avery turned on Claudia again.

  “How can you say that to a child? To your own child…”

  But Jane had raced up the stairs to her room, leaving them to indulge in their own gluttonously vituperative feast. She fumbled with the clasp on the violin case and tumbled the violin out onto her bed, flinging the case aside. She seized the violin by its neck and ran back halfway down the stairs.

  “I don’t care! I don’t care about the violin!” she screamed into the ongoing melee. “You do everything wrong! I wish you hadn’t had me, too! I wish I weren’t even here! You do every single thing wrong! I didn’t ask for a violin. I didn’t ask for you to go to any trouble. I don’t want it! I don’t want it!” She raised the violin up with both hands, high above the banister of the stairs. She was shaking from head to foot, holding that beautiful violin that only she—only she—could play so well. That’s what she knew. That’s what she thought her parents knew. In a second one of them would take it safely away from her, and she looked down at them, standing stock-still below her. She had, indeed, stopped their fighting. She had caught their absolute attention, and they were standing frozen there, staring back at her. But as she looked down at them, she caught a fleeting look of interest passing over both their faces as they saw their daughter in such a melodramatic pose. And it was also a look of undisguised curiosity—so much in the world was genuinely boring to Claudia and Avery. But that one instant of dispassionate observance was more than Jane could bear. She gritted her teeth, and with a low moan of fury she brought the violin smashing down across the banister, where its back cracked in two and the strings made a flat twang.

  Everyone stood completely still until Jane flung the ruined instrument down the rest of the stairs and turned and ran back to her room, where she put her jeans on over her pajamas and stepped into her boots. She pulled on a sweat shirt and grabbed her parka. She came back down the stairs and walked between her two parents without speaking to them or looking at them, and they were absolutely quiet. She went through the kitchen and out the back, not even slamming the door behind her. She had used up the major allotment of drama in her own life.

  After she was gone, Avery and Claudia couldn’t think of a thing to say to each other. They stood among all the boxes and ribbons and wrapping paper utterly numb and unthinking.

  “Aren’t you tired?” Claudia said, without any guile whatsoever, even though it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. “Aren’t you tired?” She started up the stairs slowly, stepping over Jane’s violin, and Avery followed her. They got into bed, each on his or her own side, and fell sound asleep before either one of them displaced their extraordinary and slightly drunken fatigue with anything like lust or anything like remorse.

  11

  Jane left the house and walked straight down the path through the meadow, and she, too, did not allow herself to reflect. She had forgotten to take her gloves, and she put her hands in her pockets; but they had already become so cold that she couldn’t warm them, and she began to shiver in the frigid air. She headed toward the Tunbridges’, where all the windows spilled a soft light out onto the dingy snow. Jane was moving like a dumb thing, no more thoughtful than the big turtles that migrated inland every year from the Missouri River across I-70, where Avery and Claudia always pulled over onto the shoulder and rushed out on foot into the traffic to rescue them. Jane was making her way through the meadow with the same blind instinct as the turtles. The light ahead of her in the dismal day was like warmth itself, puddling
the yard around the huge brick house in golden rectangles.

  She went down the path past the landmarks of her own invention and made her way to the kitchen door. She was moving in such a risky time, too, on this day, because for any people who celebrate Christmas, the hours after lunch and until time for bed are the deadliest hours of the year, filled as they are with exhaustion and disenchantment, but also colored with some unspecified expectations.

  Maggie had told Jane long ago not ever to knock at their door since she was always welcome, and Jane believed her. She went in through the empty kitchen and found the family and two friends of Celeste’s in the dining room, where some of them were sitting around the table, some standing and talking. Maggie was at the far end of the long table, idly smoothing out the folds of some wrapping paper so it could be used again and talking to Mark, who was slouched in a chair next to her. He was looking glum, leaning back in his chair with his hands in his pockets. He had been genuinely appreciative when he had received an electric typewriter earlier in the morning, and now he was trying to remember that gratitude, but he was also checking it off against the list of things he remembered his sisters had received. As a middle child he always felt a trifle slighted, and Maggie glanced at him and knew it. She wasn’t particularly irritated either. Mark was not a jealous or greedy child on any day but this one. She was thinking that perhaps they all should go their separate ways until dinner. The children could put their gifts away; Vince could take a nap. She was thinking about this at the very moment she spotted Jane slipping, white-faced and tense, into the room.

  In one second her whole family would turn and see Jane, and it would cause a stir and a delay. She would never get everyone to disperse because Jane looked blanched with anguish. Maggie cared about Jane in a proprietary way since she was so important to Diana, and also Maggie had a simple and unambiguous concern for Jane. But not at this moment. She had three families coming for a light Christmas supper around the tree, and part of the pleasure that they would all take in the buffet she planned was that it would appear to have occurred spontaneously, without effort. Very little is more difficult to achieve. She did not want the complication of Jane’s white misery, whatever its cause, although she did not think this all the way through. She was not unkind; she was only harassed, and she deftly intercepted the situation.