The Time of Her Life Read online

  Who will catch me.

  I don’t know who.

  Who could be Maggie.

  Who could be Dad.

  Who could be Mom.

  Who could be Alice.

  Who. Who. Who. Who.

  She had had to call Miss Jessup Alice so the message would have exactly four words; that was very important to her. She read over the page several times and then carried her notebook to her desk and took her scissors from the drawer and cut all the little messages into separate slips like papers from fortune cookies. She was vastly pleased when she spread them all before her, and a grand idea came into her mind. She folded each slip in half and in half again so that she could not see the words, and she hid them in secret places all around her room. She put one in her pillowcase and one in each dresser drawer. When she noticed the little vial of Maggie’s pills that she had put back in her bottom drawer, she paused a moment and replaced it with one of the notes. She slipped the bottle into her pocket and distributed the rest of the folded papers in other parts of her room. She decided that when she was her other self, whichever of the notes she came upon first would be an important clue to know about her life. She stood still in the center of the room for a while, savoring the mystery she had created, glad that the sun was beaming into her little cavern, illuminating everything but not uncovering any of her secrets.

  She wandered off after a while to her father’s study, where she had set up her music stand, and she practiced for about a half an hour, but she had discovered that when she took any of the pills, the sound of the music she played was, to her own ear, muffled and distant, and she put her violin away and curled up in the Eames chair that faced the window and the long stretch of snow-covered meadow that rose up beyond her line of vision. Her thoughts became muddled in a comforting and pleasant way, and she finally let herself go into sleep.

  When she woke up, it was dark; the afternoon was long gone, and high in the black sky was a perfect crescent moon and the North Star. She was aware of a heavy, unpleasant, muzzy feeling behind her eyes, and she was very careful when she got up. Although she could see fairly well in the light reflected off the snow and through the windows, she still extended her arms on either side to help her navigate. She made her way through the dark house to the light that was on in the kitchen. Her mother was there in her long red robe in a flurry of activity at the sink, rinsing dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher with a great deal of clattering and in sudden, jerky movements. But Jane wasn’t sure about this; she often saw the world in rapid motion just after the pills wore off.

  “Do you want me to fix some soup, or something, for dinner?” she asked her mother. Claudia scarcely turned and did not answer; she went on working through the pile of dishes.

  Jane went to the refrigerator and opened it. She stood before it, assessing its contents and feeling slightly queasy but hungry at the same time. Behind her there was a sudden crash, and she turned around to see her mother holding two edges of a china plate that seemed to have exploded in her hands. She dropped the two pieces on the floor and took up another plate, which she brought down with terrific force on the porcelain edge of the sink.

  Jane was horribly startled, and she stood back against the open door of the refrigerator and stared at her mother. Claudia’s face was contorted into the most frightening expression Jane had ever seen. She was truly filled with a sickening fear because at eleven years old Jane was mostly a child, and she looked at Claudia and thought that her mother was irrevocably large and wild in the compact kitchen.

  “God damn you!” Claudia said, and her voice began to rise. “God damn you! You could have told me the truth!” She kicked the mess around her feet and sent little pieces of glass flying all over the room. “I just want you to tell me what you’re doing!” Claudia was shrieking, and Jane was very conscious of her mother’s height and fury. She could only stare back with her glance aimed directly at her mother in terror. Her body felt as if it were sinking into itself.

  “Look! Look! What are these? What do these mean?” And Claudia pulled from her pocket a handful of Jane’s little notes she had written to herself, unfolded, but bent in angles where they had been so carefully creased.

  “God damn it! What are these? What are you doing all by yourself in your room? What do these mean?” But Jane stood there paralyzed, seeing that her mother was crying and flushed.

  “Answer me, for God’s sake! Is there something wrong with you? Can’t you hear me?” Claudia’s voice had become strained and frantic, and Jane’s mind was blank. Suddenly her mother leaped toward her and slapped her across the face with a smack of her hand that Jane heard before she felt it. It was Claudia, though, who then doubled over as if she were in pain and began crying in earnest. Sobbing and gulping for air.

  “Oh, God, Jane. Oh, God. Aren’t you happy at all? Am I so terrible? What can I do? What can I do?” Her voice had trailed off into a helpless quavering. “Why won’t you help me? Oh, God. I really am the foulest person to walk the earth. That’s the truth, isn’t it?” She backed up and sat down in a kitchen chair, and laid her head down on her arms, which she spread across the table, and she was still sobbing. Jane just stood gazing at her for a little while, stunned. At last she went a little way toward Claudia but stopped again in the middle of the room. Her face stung, and she was terrified to approach her mother. She did move closer, though, close enough to reach out and stroke her mother’s back down the line of her shoulder. She stood shyly tracing her fingers along her mother’s shoulder, and she left Claudia when Claudia was no longer shaking. She left her mother there with tears still streaming over her cheeks and soaking one of the billowing sleeves of her robe.

  Jane went to her room, walking through the house in the dark, and lay down on her own bed and did not cry at all. She just lay there feeling light-headed and nauseated and knowing that she had done something terribly harmful when she had addressed this self from her other self. She was filled with pity and anger and humiliation, and those powerful and contradictory emotions sapped her of wakefulness. She finally fell again into a deep sleep.

  Claudia fell asleep, too, at the table, but she didn’t sleep long. She slipped in and out of being awake just long enough to stop crying, and then she opened her eyes in the bright kitchen, where the water was still running in the sink and the refrigerator door stood wide open. The machine whined and hummed behind her. For one instant she didn’t remember where she was, but only for a few seconds; then she got up to turn off the water and close the refrigerator door, and she was engulfed with self-loathing.

  She could not bear what she had done, the way she had behaved. She could not stand to be only with herself, and she moved out of the bright kitchen and through the house without flipping on any of the light switches. She moved without thinking and looked in on Jane, who was deeply asleep with a pale light falling across her bed from the round window above it.

  Claudia left her and paced the upper hall, despising herself, sick with her own nature, but trapped in only these several rooms with everything she was or had become. She was trapped with the consideration of consequences. She had infringed on her daughter’s dignity, and the picture of Jane’s guarded but horrified gaze as she stood immobile in the kitchen was so painful to Claudia that she put her hand up over her eyes briefly—like a flinch—and she tried to divert herself. She went from room to room in search of her cigarettes.

  That afternoon she had been appalled at finding the strange little slips of paper tucked away around her daughter’s room, just as she was also appalled that she was searching the room at all. But she read each note as she came upon it and tried to put it together in her mind with Jane’s long and serious face, her sweet, straight eyebrows, her total lack of guile. As she turned up yet another note, dismay and anger spread through her with a rush of blood to her face and fingertips. Even the backs of her hands turned rosy red. And she thought of girls and women and their smug secrets. Maggie at lunch and all the things she had only
implied. Herself and the things she never said. She thought of female bodies and their recesses and mysteries and hidden places. And finding Jane asleep in the study had heightened this sudden ire. Whatever could be more exclusive than the body of a sleeping woman? It was a repudiation. She was baffled and enraged, and she hadn’t awakened her daughter. She had known that she was beyond reason at that moment and untrustworthy. She had known that she was terrified of all the things she might not know and might or might not find out.

  Claudia found her cigarettes in the kitchen, and now she smoked and walked and despaired of herself. Jane hadn’t stolen anything. She hadn’t hidden money; she hadn’t hidden pills. The only things she had hidden away in her room were the peculiar and melancholy little notes. But it had been unbearable to Claudia that her daughter had hidden away her thoughts. She felt more bereft and alone than she had ever felt before in her life because even though Jane might have her secrets, it was also true that there was no one else Claudia had ever trusted so much. Whatever Jane might know about her mother—all the private things that Jane did know—she could be counted on to encompass that knowledge and still extend to her mother far more mercy than any other person ever would or could, male or female.

  Claudia was desperate, as she walked the house, to find some way to make amends, and she had a sudden burst of enthusiasm when she thought of Jane’s new violin tucked away in her closet. She went straight up to her room and brought it out from hiding and opened the case on her bed to look at it, to see if it would be sufficient. She turned on all the lights in the bedroom, even the overhead fixture, and walked around the bed, considering it from every angle. She didn’t know if it would impress Jane; it was such a plain brown instrument. It would have to be properly presented, and Claudia took the violin down to the living room to prepare a surprise for her daughter, to try to construct an apology.

  She plugged in the lights of the Christmas roping that swagged up the stairs, and she turned on the lights on the tall tree that was still wired upright against the towering center beam of the house. She took her black cape from the downstairs closet and spread it over the Danisk teak coffee table, taking care to drape it in elaborate folds, and she put the open case on one end of the table, exhibiting its plush red interior. She placed the violin at the other end, turned at an angle with the bow canted across its strings.

  As always with Claudia, one passion was quick to follow another without any sensational carryover. No immediate nostalgia or shadows colored one mood to the next, and she had moved in the space of a few hours from a state of bereavement to anticipatory euphoria.

  She went back to the top of the stairs to see how it would look to Jane as she came down the steps, and she decided it lacked drama. She went to the dining room for the Dansk candlesticks and searched through the storage closet for the elaborate candelabrum she had brought with her from the house in Natchez. She even unpacked the set of twenty-four little votive candles that released insect repellent as they burned, and that weren’t brought out until summer, when Avery placed them at intervals along the broad top railing of the deck. She put the eight-armed candelabrum on the parson’s table behind the couch and then had to go back to the closet to see if she could find eight candles. It took her some time to insert them properly because the eight she had come up with were different sizes and colors, and she had to take the cellophane from some of them and wrap it around the stem ends of several candles so they would fit tightly. She worked in a great hurry, though, fervent as she was with this new enthusiasm.

  She dispersed the small votive candles around the room and the two Dansk candlesticks on either side of the violin. At last she went to the kitchen for wooden matches and lit them all. Then she sat down on the couch to enjoy the full effect of the flickering light and even the sweetly pungent odor of insecticide enclosed in the winter-tight house. She was deeply satisfied with the arrangement, and she had everything prepared, but it was only five-thirty in the morning.

  Claudia tried to wait until six o’clock, but after fifteen minutes of moving around the room to see how it looked from every corner she lost patience and went quietly up the stairs to Jane’s room. When she stopped in the doorway this time, Jane opened her eyes immediately and saw her there and sat straight up in bed. Her mother was lit from behind by a strange, quavering light in her gauzy robe, and it alarmed Jane. She didn’t say anything; she couldn’t see her mother’s expression, and she was wary. Claudia felt the reverberations of her own yearning fan out into all the angles of Jane’s small room. What Claudia wanted at that moment above anything else was to extend comfort to Jane as Jane had once extended it to her, and she crossed the room and awkwardly put her arms around Jane’s shoulders and stooped slightly to lay her cheek against the top of Jane’s head. But it was a fleeting embrace, a reluctant and mortifying welling up of so much emotion that she only risked a soft encompassment of her daughter for a moment. And Jane felt as though she had been briefly enfolded in wings. Claudia moved off to circle the room.

  “I’m so sorry, Jane.” Her voice was very solemn, and she had her back to Jane. It wasn’t enough to say, and she knew it. She knew that nothing could be forgiven in this instance, and it seemed to her that after all, there was a sort of justice there. There would be an indelible picture, for as long as Jane was in the world, of Claudia galvanized with rage and holding out a streaming handful of the fragile little papers toward her daughter. For all the rest of her life there would be in Jane’s head this little tableau of her mother’s betrayal.

  Claudia moved again to the doorway, where her robe glowed transparently around her. “Janie, isn’t tonight the night of the concert? Do you feel like getting up now? Could you just come downstairs for a minute and help me with something? And I can fix us some breakfast. I don’t think either one of us had anything to eat last night.” Even when she mentioned the night before, Claudia’s voice dwindled away bleakly, and Jane was still thrilled from her mother’s touch. Her entire sympathy was awakened by now and was directed toward her mother, who was so encumbered and overflowing with sentiment; she was so awfully vulnerable in a new way.

  Jane got out of bed at once and followed her mother to the top of the stairs, where she only watched her mother’s back preceding her down the steps, and then she became aware of the peculiar scent of insecticide, a smell from midsummer, and of all the little candles everywhere. But it was not until her mother had moved away from the bottom step that Jane caught sight of the violin, and she froze in place with one foot still slightly raised above the next step. She did not move or speak for a moment. Across the room, standing against the light, Claudia expelled a slow sigh of gratification, although she was uneasy, too, because she didn’t want Jane to thank her. Claudia had always anguished over giving gifts; it had always seemed to her an awful thing, embarrassing to everyone and even unfairly burdensome to the recipient in various ways. She thought people preferred to be prepared. She was not in the least stingy, but she lacked the courage of the natural-born gift giver; she had no idea of any graceful way to accept thanks.

  In fact, before Jane said anything at all, Claudia preempted her and began to speak very rapidly. “It’s just that I couldn’t stand not to give it to you now.” And she held up her hand as if Jane were having some thought that she shouldn’t have. “And I know… Well, I don’t think for a minute that this is to make up for anything. I wish it could, but I don’t really think that one thing can make up for another. I mean, both things have still happened.” She paused at this point, because she heard herself nervously chattering away, getting caught up in one of her pet philosophies. And she wondered if she even meant what she was saying. Certainly when the idea had occurred to her, she had intended this to be a gesture that would wipe away the night before. She talked on, though, because one way or another it didn’t really matter if she meant it or not.

  “It’s really your early Christmas present, Janie, but you have your concert tonight. Actually I liked the dark wood b
etter, but Alice said that this was a better instrument. And don’t worry. Alice selected it. You know that I don’t know anything about choosing a violin. I mean, don’t worry that it’s the wrong one. Anyway, Alice said that you could try it for a few months.” She had finally become so nervous that she had to stop. There was something more that she meant to convey to Jane, but she didn’t know exactly what it was or how to do it, and Jane was still standing on the stairs stiff with surprise.

  “But why don’t you try it, Jane? I think you ought to try it by yourself, and I want to go fix some breakfast for us anyway. I’ll fix French toast. And later today I’m going shopping for a dress for you to wear tonight. Something really special. A beautiful dress for tonight. They’ll be so surprised at the concert! Everyone will!” And the triumph in her voice was solely on behalf of Jane.

  When Jane was left alone in the room with the violin, she stood still for quite some time, looking at it from across the room before she moved over the rug to see it more closely. She was afraid even to touch it. She was horrified by it because she knew that she had trained herself to a state of mastery of the rented instrument she had learned on and played for the past five years. She had been coached by Miss Jessup and had learned for herself all the ways to compensate for the irregularities and deficiencies of the other violin, and she had planned to amaze everyone—and anyone, too, anyone who might ever have taken her lightly, even her father. She had been sure she would surprise them all when she stood alone on the stage and played the Bach. Every energy she had had for the past weeks had been directed toward that one idea. The only other thing in her life for that time had been her newfound and unconsidered adoration of her mother. Until these past few days she had basked in and absorbed the remarkable, shimmering quality of her mother’s undivided’ attention, and she had pinned any thoughts of the future on her music. But she had seen such pleasure on her mother’s face as she stood in the room raptly happy and irradiated by the candlelight that she could not possibly have explained to her that she ought to refuse this gift. She was unable to think of any way to postpone accepting it. Jane had understood, when she saw the tension in every line of her mother’s body as Claudia stood over the violin and among all those candles, that she was completely responsible just now for her mother’s happiness. All hope for herself and her own triumph began to fade as she contemplated the light golden and beautifully made instrument lying before her on the table.