The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  Until the summer I met Martha, the house had looked almost as disreputable as ours. Her parents, who lived in New York City, had rented it out for years and years. I loved the two men who were the last in a long line of tenants. Pan and Sven. They were ballet dancers. They drove a red sports car and were waiting for a check from Sven's father, a famous novelist who lived in Mexico. Pan colored in his bald pate with some kind of brown pencil, and he made this shiny pretend hair come to a point in front, like a cartoon devil. Pan and Sven fascinated me, and I begged to take ballet lessons from them instead of from Madame de Fornier. Unfortunately, they were arrested before I started. They were con men. There was no check, no famous novelist father in Mexico or anywhere else, no roles in the Paris ballet. Just charm and a leased red sports car and a painted point of hair. How I missed them when the police came and took them off in handcuffs. Even then they both looked suave and insouciant, words I learned from them. Sven waved, lifting the policeman's hand with his as he did so. Pan winked and his chiffon scarf blew behind him in the breeze.

  "I will miss them, too," my mother said, kissing me on the head. "Though, really, they pruned that lilac to within an inch of its life."

  The house stood empty for a while, then I noticed some activity, cars driving into the driveway, people opening and closing the front door. My mother pretended nothing was happening. But something was happening. First, the workmen came. They replaced the old roof with shingles of golden wood. The house, like the others, was large and square, built in 1860. I watched the workmen that summer without wondering who might be moving in. Maybe I thought the workmen were moving in. Probably the next step just never occurred to me. The activity itself was enough. To see the mirror of my own house transformed—first gutted, then put back together like a new breed of Humpty Dumpty—was riveting. I sat at the edge of the trees on the trunk in a weeping willow that had taken a convenient horizontal twist and watched in open-mouthed abstraction.

  It wasn't that I was alone before Martha came. I had my two brothers who, though they were so much older than I was, tried to make contact every once in a while, like those people who beam radio messages into outer space, just in case. And there were my parents, of course. My great-aunt Anna did not yet live with us, but even so, there were enough of us so that it never occurred to me I was lonely. It was only when I saw Martha, a little girl, a person who resembled me in height and weight and the pitch of her voice, galloping like a horse across her lawn the way I galloped across mine—it was only then, months after the workmen had come and transformed the house, as the family drove up in a blue station wagon and a little girl my age jumped out and galloped, that I realized I needed a friend.

  Martha saw me that day as I sat and watched from the weeping willow tree. She smiled, slowed her imaginary horse to a walk, began to approach me, then suddenly was whisked off by the unruly steed.

  "Whoa!" she cried. "Whoaaaa!"

  I was tempted to run out and join her. I recognized her invitation. But I just sat and waited in my tree, dumb and agog, until she got bored racing all over her new lawn and ran over as if she had no horse at all, and said, "Look! I have braces!"

  She did indeed sport an impressive set of shiny braces, which made me instantly jealous. But as she was a newcomer, almost a guest, I asserted my native superiority and personal liberality by being gracious.

  "And a new house," I said.

  "No. It's really old."

  Martha and I then entered our first of many arguments, pedantic but passionate exchanges, and our friendship began.

  "New to you," I said.

  "But not to you."

  "I already have a house, just like this one, and my house is really, really old." I was proud of our house, and pride has always confused my debating abilities.

  "See?" she said.

  "A hundred years old."

  I walked home through the meadow that day in a thoughtful frame of mind. It was August and the Queen Anne's lace was as high as my chin. The sticky milkweed was even higher. The bees were out. Their noise was close, but muffled by the tall weeds. Above, the sky was so blue I wished the jungle of stalks around me would part and let me see it fully, an endless bowl of sky. Or that I was taller and could stroll through the wildflowers and skunk cabbage without noticing them, the way my father did, and my brothers, and my mother, all of them wading through the field without a thought, the jungle no jungle at all to them, the sky theirs for the looking. I glimpsed patches of blue, breathed in the damp, flowery air, smiled a secret smile hidden by green, and allowed myself to feel the thrill of new, sudden intimacy.

  Much of the facade of our house was adorned by lilac bushes, and between their gray stems, as thick as little trunks, and the weathered white paint of the house, were several indentations in the packed dirt where the dog went to rest when the sun was high, and where I often joined him. I crawled past the porch's edge to the first dip in the ground, and there he was, silently thumping his tail. I suddenly knew I would spend less time crouched beside him in our hiding place and I felt disloyal and sad and, at the same time, as happy as if I'd fallen in love, which, of course, I had.

  "Good-bye," I said, formally, politely.

  When I got inside, into the soft, caressing gloom of our house on a sunny day, I passed my father in the hall and told him about the little girl in the house next door.

  "Uh-oh," he said. Then he laughed and offered me a puff of his pipe, a little joke between us which annoyed my mother, who seemed to think, each and every time, that I would actually take him up on it.

  I pushed past him, and said, "Not just now, thank you. I'd prefer a cigar," which is what I always said, though this time I was impatient to be off to my mother. "Cuban."

  Perhaps this is the place to tell you that my mother, my mother the Barlow of Barlow, is actually, like those imaginary cigars we used to torture her with, Cuban herself. She was born there, anyway, and lived there until she went to Vassar. My father is a Schwartz of Brooklyn. I was never sure why they lived in Barlow because both of them spoke with such tender nostalgia of their former residences, and yet I could not imagine them anywhere but Barlow.

  "We are the closest extant Barlows they've got," my mother said.

  "You know, they really ought to rename the town Schwartz," my father said.

  Then Martha's Barlows came. But Martha's family, according to my mother, were interlopers.

  "We are endemic," she said. "They are introduced."

  On the day I met Martha, I went looking for my mother and I found her in the garden. She tended her garden with maternal care. Seeds were tucked gently into little cardboard cups before the snow melted. The ground was combed and nourished in spring, blanketed with pine needles in winter. In return for her care, the garden gave her roses and, more important, lilacs. Every kind of lilac grew around our house, deep purple, pale violet, white, even the rare yellow lilac. My mother ordered plants from nurseries sometimes, but often she just scoured the gardens of the neighboring towns, surreptitiously taking cuttings when she found some variety that was really worthwhile ("You simply can't buy this," she would say, triumphant, holding the purloined bloom in her arms like a baby).

  My mother sometimes said that the only reason she stayed north was the lilac, that you couldn't grow lilacs in Cuba, though you could grow anything else and everything else, things to eat, papayas dropping of their own free will into your open hands, golden bananas lining the streets.

  The lilacs bloomed only in spring, for a few short weeks, which made them even more precious. For the rest of the growing season, my mother contented herself with roses. I watched her now as she stooped among them, then stood up to face me, a narrow figure in jeans and an old blue shirt of my father's: a pole of blue reaching up to the straw hat from which an enormous circle of shade spread around her. I often thought my mother looked like a tree. Today, the tree she looked like was a palm tree. And from up there, in her highest branches, she spoke.

  "Jane, do you hav
e to pee, honey?"

  Horrified, I put my hands on my hips and scowled. I know when I scowl because my whole face stretches down in a most satisfying way. And by the age of seven, my scowl was already quite accomplished. I had been practicing in the mirror for years.

  "You're squirming," my mother said.

  "There's a new girl," I said. "At the new house."

  "It's not new," my mother said, and turned back to her roses without another word.

  I tried again to get her interested at dinner that night, but she ignored me, smiling and saying something in Spanish to my father.

  "I don't speak Spanish," he said.

  "And it is new," I said. "To them."

  My brothers gave each other looks at the sound of the word them, looks that meant they knew something interesting to which I was not, and was not going to become, privy.

  "What?" I said.

  "Nothing," said my father.

  Sometimes in these situations I had to wait a long time until someone cracked or accidentally let a word drop or spoke thinking I was in bed when I was sitting on the stairs, my knees up to my chin beneath my nightgown. It took almost a month to learn about Cousin Edna's abortion, and almost a year after that to discover what an abortion was. But often all I required was a minute or two, a caesura of calm. My family's attention usually wandered away from me very easily, in truth. So I waited at the table, quiet and inconspicuous.

  "You shouldn't speak Spanish to me, my dear."

  "Oh, pooh. Why not?"

  "Parce que le pickup ne marche pas," said my brother Andrew. He was thirteen and had just started French in school.

  My mother shrugged. She drank some wine. A whole glass of wine. I was more and more hopeful. With even one glass of wine, her cheeks would turn pink, as pink as one of my mother's Bourbon Queen roses. She rarely had two, for she might become sleepy and dreamy. But with this one glass, I thought she might at least get flushed and cheerful and talkative. I looked at Fred, my oldest brother. He was going to college next year and I would miss him. I thought Fred was extraordinarily handsome and had always wished that I looked like him. When he developed a twitch a few years before, I was so impressed that I began to twitch, too, in imitation, and had been sent home from school by a worried nurse. It seemed so urbanely adult that I refused to stop blinking until he stopped, which luckily he did after only a week or two.

  "Let's forget it," Fred said. "All of it."

  "Fine with me," my father said. "It's not my family."

  That was all I got that night, though I sat motionless and silent, as patient as a post. It wasn't until the next morning that I understood that the family that was not Daddy's family was Mommy's family. I saw their new mailbox, which had the number 27 on it. That had always held some interest for me, for ours was number 17 and between our two houses there was only the meadow and the line of trees. Why had the town numbered ten nonexistent houses? There was a subdivision across the street full of split-levels, but it had its own road, Jennifer Circle, named after the builder's odious daughter Jennifer, who told everyone that my house was haunted. I suppose the town had numbered the houses in that way because it foresaw the land being sold off to developers someday and wanted to save everyone the trouble of fractions on their mailboxes. I would sit on the side of the road and pretend I was looking at the ten phantom houses, looking in their windows, at the cars in their driveways. Number 18, number 19, number 20—who would live there? Number 21, 22, 23, 24. Would they have children? 25, 26. Would they have a dog? On hot days when I was too enervated to do anything but sit by the road and pout and throw stones, I would populate the entire area with imaginary friends and foes. But now here was a real family in number 27, and on their mailbox in black letters was the name "Barlow."

  At first I thought Barlow referred to the name of our road. I waited at the mailbox, sitting in the gravel on the side of the road and drawing designs in the sand with a stick. I knew the girl I'd met yesterday would see me, and I knew she would come out when she saw me. I imagined what a tempting sight I was to a new girl in the neighborhood, one who had not yet made any friends. At least I would have been a tempting sight to myself, a girl squatting in the dirt, doodling. And indeed the new girl soon materialized, squatted beside me, and began her own design. We neither of us spoke at first. She may have felt shy, but I was simply happy. The sticks scratched in the sand, scraping a soft message, a code of random swirls that both of us understood perfectly. We could have been drawing up legal papers, signing a declaration, writing a poem.

  "I'm in third grade," said the girl.

  I was about to say, "Me too," but then she added, "Going into fourth."

  "Oh,"

  She stopped drawing and pointed the stick at me.

  "I'm going into third," I said.

  "I know," she said. "Your name is Jane. You're my cousin."

  "I am?"

  "Yeah. But let's be friends."

  I don't remember what I said to this proposition. Probably I just stared with my mouth open.

  "I'm not really going into fourth grade," she added.

  Her name was Martha, she said, Martha Barlow. See the mailbox? It says "Barlow" right there. Just like the name of the street. I noticed that she called our road a street. I remember that it sounded so urban. We were distant cousins, she said. Her great-grandfather used to live at 27 Barlow Street. Her parents had decided to fix up the old house, to rescue it to use as a summer house. I remember that too, that they had come to the country to rescue the house, as if Barlow were the country and not a town, as if one couldn't live there in the winter, as if their house needed to be rescued.

  "They came to the country to rescue the house," I said to my mother that afternoon. "For the summer."

  "Oh, please."

  "You didn't tell me we're cousins."

  My mother didn't answer me, but she pulled me over to her and gave me a hug. She kissed the top of my head. In this way she communicated to me that while Martha was very much at fault for being my cousin, I was in no way to blame for it myself. My mother was an amazing combination of the critical and the accepting. She shimmered back and forth, like a color you can't quite name. Is it teal or slate or gray, or threadbare black?

  I asked my father that night what was going on. My father had big ears. I mention this because his ears were very dear to me as a child. They were comforting. My father was not the gentlest person of my acquaintance. He was compact and muscular, he spoke in a growl. Most children were afraid of him. I knew him, so of course I wasn't afraid one bit, but when he seemed particularly gruff, I would look at his ears, and I would be reassured. I found my father sitting on the porch, having a drink. His tie was off, draped with his jacket over the railing, and his white shirt was damp and wrinkled. Unlike most of the fathers I knew, mine always wore penny loafers, buffed to an impossible shine, though they were so old that they were as wrinkled as a face. I loved his shoes and I looked at them tenderly, looked at his nice, big ears and, ignoring the tinkling ice of his drink, the sound of an adult relaxing, an adult who wanted to be left alone, I climbed onto his lap.

  He kissed me and offered me his drink, even though my mother was nowhere to be seen and so could not benefit from this provocation. My father always offered me coffee or Scotch or a puff on his pipe. My mother knew it was a joke and knew I never accepted, but she couldn't help herself and she would glare at him, and say, "Carl!" in her most severe voice. Then my father and I would laugh the laugh of collusion.

  "Oh, Daddy," I said, pushing the drink away.

  He shrugged.

  "Daddy?"

  "Mmm?"

  "Daddy?" I said again. I knew this was a mistake. I knew he would now sigh in that weary parental way. I knew I should just say what I had to say. "Daddy?"

  He sighed the sigh I had been expecting, the sigh I hated, for it made the distance between a child, that is, myself, and an adult, that is, all the important people in my life up to that point, so manifest.


  Helplessly I again said, "Daddy?"

  He said, "What, Jane, what?"

  Then I told him that the Barlows were our cousins. "Why is that such a big secret? Mom is very strange."

  "Your mother is very strange, but it can't be a very big secret if you know it, can it?"

  "It's not a secret," my mother said, coming out onto the porch. "It's a blight."

  "Well, let's say they have a past, okay?" my father said.

  But everyone had a past. Even I had a past. I could remember my grandma Barlow, a tall bosomy person who took me on her lap to tell me stories of Cuba and tales from the Bible, which left me certain that Havana was on the Red Sea, that manna and mangoes were closely related, that the Burning Bush gave off a scent of vanilla. I had a past, though I was not yet eight, and my past opened on to the pasts of others. I must have looked as confused and disgruntled as I felt because my mother burst out laughing, and said, "Poor-r-r Hayne," in an exaggerated, comic Spanish accent, and my father began to try to explain the Barlow past to me.

  "It was so long ago," he said, "that it won't matter to you. But sometimes families have..." He paused.

  "Wars," my mother said.

  "Yes, all right. Civil wars." He told me there were three Barlow brothers, which I already knew, and so I grew impatient and stopped listening for a while. When I tuned in again, the relatives swarmed like flies. Frederick, Franklin, and Francis. Francis died a bachelor without issue. Franklin had one son named Hamilton and was Martha's great-grandfather. Frederick had two children, one of whom was my grandfather Edwin, the other my great-aunt Anna.

  But never mind about Aunt Anna now, my father said.

  "I shall always mind about Aunt Anna," my mother replied. I thought her tone rather dramatic.