The Time of Her Life Page 21

  “Oh, Jane! Merry Christmas! You look absolutely stunned. I saw the beautiful locket your father found for you. It must have really been a surprise.” And this seemed so plausible that Maggie felt very fond of and pleased for Jane at the same time. Since Avery had been away, his gift had obviously touched his daughter a great deal. “And you and Diana have to make plans for the concert. Diana got a ticket, too, you know. You’ll drive in to Kansas City with Celeste. Diana, why don’t you get some eggnog for both of you? You can put it on a tray with some cookies. There are all kinds. You and Jane can take the tray up to your room. Show Jane that incredible jewelry box your godmother sent you!” She had been looking at Diana, but now she turned to the rest of the room. “Jane, maybe you can help Diana carry her presents up to her room. And, Celeste, you and Mark do the same thing. We have people coming at six. I really would be grateful if you would all put your things away and get this room cleared.”

  And so, when any one of them noticed Jane, her strained appearance had been interpreted for them, and they were absorbed in their own day anyway. Celeste and her friends got up and began to sort through the boxes, giving Jane scarcely more than a friendly glance. Mark gathered himself together and stood up to look down the length of the table and see what he ought to remove. Only Diana looked at Jane warily. Diana had had a lovely Christmas, and she had been looking forward all morning to arranging her new clothes in her closet and putting her stickers in the sticker album Celeste had given her. Besides, Jane had hurt her feelings over the past few weeks, and she wasn’t pleased to relinquish her plans to Jane’s mood.

  Diana had always wanted to be like Jane a little bit. She admired Jane’s cynicism and wit even though it was sometimes disconcerting. She was awed by Jane’s scorn, which was so wide that every aspect of their social lives was tinged by her disapproval. But for the past two months or so Jane had been so sharp-tongued that Diana was tired of trying to please her. Maggie had said that Jane would snap out of it, but when Diana looked at Jane standing rigid in the doorway, her spirits sank. She began gathering her gifts together and simply handed some to Jane, who followed her upstairs without a word. Diana didn’t offer Jane any eggnog or cookies; she wanted Jane to go home, and she didn’t make any pretense of graciousness.

  Diana was often defensive around Jane—of her own family and their predictable domestic arrangements. Jane had a certain air of authority and chic in their small circle in her own right but also by virtue of being her parents’ daughter. All the girls thought that Claudia was exotic, and most of them were a little in love with Avery, who always was careful to remember their names and never condescended toward them. He admired them— each one—on her own merits. The Parks had a strange kind of glamour. What Diana had not figured out was that glamour gets its shimmer by the possibilities it encompasses. It might lead to even greater things, a larger renown, but it is also dazzling because it may be so very brief. It also encompasses the possibilities of ruin and decay. There’s nothing safe about it.

  Jane put the gifts she was carrying for Diana on the bed and sat down in the big chair by Diana’s window while Diana moved about, putting things away with her own face closed and set in response to the peculiar lack of animation of her friend. She dutifully showed Jane this and that. She held up a sweat shirt-skirt and a matching striped top and leg warmers to show Jane, and Jane just looked and nodded. “That’s really nice,” she said. And somehow that was more insulting to Diana than if Jane had assumed that faint air of contempt which would have left Diana wondering if she should ever wear the outfit at all. Once in a fit of pique Jane had told Diana that her tastes were “incredibly bourgeois,” and although Diana had resented it, she had also taken down her bulletin board, about which Jane had said, “Oh, God, Diana! That’s awfully cute.” Diana had reassessed her whole wardrobe and insisted that her father detach the canopy from her antique bed.

  Now, though, Diana was as tired as anyone from a morning of familial celebration, and she sat down cross-legged on the bed and opened the jewelry box that had come so carefully packed and gift-wrapped through the mail. It was quite a handsome mahogany box decorated with creamy inlaid mother-of-pearl flowers on top, but Diana was more interested in looking in the mirror fitted under its cover. She took out a tiny pair of silver unicorn earrings and put them in her pierced ears, then lifted the box to study the effect in the mirror. She shook her loose hair back from her face so she could see her ears, and she put the box down again and reached up to remove the earrings.

  “Do you have some kind of problem?” she said to Jane without looking at her, and without any hint that she wanted to know about it in case Jane did. Diana was seized with what was, for her, unusual petulance on the dregs of this day. She had never been so sharp to Jane.

  Jane didn’t say anything, in any case. She didn’t seem even to have heard Diana. It would never have occurred to Jane to reveal to anyone the things that went on in her own house. She thought that only she herself knew Avery and Claudia well enough to have the right to disapprove of them or wish that they were in any way different from the way they were. A betrayal on that scale had never crossed her mind.

  Diana was fitting another pair of earrings, small enameled flowers, into her ears, and for the moment she looked quite satisfied with herself.

  “You know, you’re really being immature about your whole situation.” This time she held her hair back with her hands and bent far over the jewelry box to see herself in the mirror. “There are lots of people whose parents get divorced. You don’t have to take it out on everyone else. Vince says that everyone will be happier with your parents apart.” She looked up, but Jane was still immobile in the chair, with her fingers laced in her lap and her elbows resting on the armrests. What Diana had said seemed to have floated right by her. She was sitting there completely still and gazing into the room, and it irritated Diana terribly that she had dared to be so outspoken to Jane and had not made any impression at all.

  “Well, Maggie says that you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, and she says it’s natural. But I really do think it’s immature. I mean, Maggie says that American children don’t even know what unhappy childhoods are. She says that in America childhood really is the time of your life. If you were in El Salvador, you might have to stand there and watch your parents be shot to death. Maggie thinks that American children are very lucky, in a way, to be able to indulge themselves in depression. Depression is really just a luxury.”

  Jane sat there where she was, and Diana began to feel apprehensive about what she was saying. She had been trying out these ideas she had heard as her parents and their friends chatted over dinner or while Celeste and her mother put away the dishes. Celeste had read Joan Didion’s book Salvador and had urged her mother to read it. Usually Jane could dismiss Diana’s adopted philosophies and opinions with a superior shrug. Also, Diana didn’t want Jane to repeat these ideas to Avery or Claudia or to ask her own parents about them. She lapsed into a mood of appeasement.

  “I’ll get us some eggnog. I think that the only kind that’s left is spiked, and I bet Maggie’ll let us have some. And some cookies. You stay here.”

  And Jane did stay there, and she did drink some eggnog and eat a cookie. But she still didn’t say very much to Diana, and when she had finished her eggnog, she stood up and put on her parka.

  “Didn’t you bring your locket over?” Diana said. She was very worried now that she had said more than she should. “Don’t go home! I’ll put all these things away, and then we can do something.” But Jane was already at the threshold of the doorway, and she turned back and made an attempt to smile at Diana, and she gave a stiff wave of her hand. Her face was so numb she didn’t believe she could say a word, and she went quietly down the back stairs and out through the kitchen, which was empty at the moment.

  She walked up the long hill toward home, but she went so slowly. It was very hard for her to move at all, the same way it sometimes is in dreams. She was having great di
fficulty breathing, and in the meadow each intake of breath came with a rasping short whoop, like a swallowed shriek. She turned along the path that led to the Troubled Rocks, although they were just a place to be; this landscape no longer held any solace for her. For a moment she leaned back against the familiar large boulder, trying hard to catch her breath and concentrating on the gray stones all around her and the icy pools they contained wherever they were pocked.

  When she had watched Diana there in her room, sitting upon her pretty bed and talking blithely out into the air, Jane had suddenly felt crushed by the conditions of her own existence. It seemed to Jane that Diana was free in the same world in which she was not. Diana’s ego and all her ambitions could expand out and out into the natural world in a great exhalation of self, not to be caught so hard against obligation, responsibility, or even love. Jane had, at that moment, been thoroughly overcome by a sensation of suffocation, and she had had to take herself away.

  And now she felt that she could not breathe at all. She put her hands across her rib cage to try to press the air out, to try to force herself to exhale, but she could not do it, and she was terrified and filled with panic all alone under the low and nasty yellow-streaked clouds.

  She turned toward the boulder in despair and leaned against it with her arms outstretched and her cheek pressed into the freezing stone. At last her breath was released in huge sobs, and she gasped air back into her lungs, only to expel it again in uncontrollable, deep moans. Tears slid down her face and froze against the surface of the rock where her head rested sideways, and down the other side of her face they fell so fast that they dripped off the angle of her jaw and trickled down her neck. She was enwrapped with grief that she could not control, and while sorrow may be dependent in degree upon the source of the misery, grief is absolute. Jane was heartbroken with loss, with the small death she had caused when she brought the violin cracking down across the banister, with the loss of each one of her parents to the other. She was heartbroken with the hopelessness of loving Avery and Claudia so much for all her life, the energy it would require, the fatigue it would cause.

  She wept on and on alone in the snow, but all the while she knew that Maggie was right. Jane knew that she was a fortunate child in the middle of Lunsbury, Missouri, which was itself in the middle of a rich and civilized country, and she couldn’t possibly defend her own anguish in the vast realm of wickedness and cruelty extant in the world. She was lost in the universe. She was negated. She could not even take any comfort in self-pity because for this moment she had lost any idea of herself. She was a paltry thing, empty of any valid sentiment.

  Nellie had heard Jane far away up the hill where she had been sitting on the Parks’ doorstep waiting for someone to let her in. With her winter coat expanding all around her like a great chrysanthemum she came snuffling and shambling along the path toward Jane in abject apology in case Jane’s distress might turn to anger. She burrowed her long collie nose against Jane’s side, and finally Jane pushed herself away from the stone and knelt down and embraced the dog. But this, in turn, alarmed Nellie, and she rolled over on her back in even more fervent and submissive apology. Jane stood up stiffly. She had stopped sobbing, although tears still ran down her face. Nellie stood up, too, and shook herself all over while Jane brushed snow off her own clothes.

  “Come on, Nellie,” she said, and she made her way back to the main path and up the hill with Nellie delightedly following along or running ahead. The silly dog was delighted to have found a companion in the dull afternoon.

  The lights were on downstairs, and the tree hadn’t been unplugged, but the upstairs was lit only by the waning daylight through the windows. Jane went straight up to her room with Nellie behind her. She hadn’t looked anywhere but straight ahead of her, and she hadn’t let herself see the violin lying as she had left it at the foot of the stairs, and she didn’t look for her parents.

  She took two capsules from the Percodan bottle and swallowed them one at a time, without water, and Nellie thought it might be a treat. She sat back on her haunches and watched Jane alertly, wagging her tail. No one had remembered to feed the dog all day, but Jane put the bottle down on her nightstand and began to take off her cold, wet clothes. She dropped everything on the floor and put on a warm pair of flannel pajamas and crawled into bed under her covers, where she curled up and tried to warm herself. She was cold to the bone and shaking violently.

  “Here Nellie! Come up! Here, Nellie!” She coaxed the dog to come reluctantly up onto her bed, although Nellie’s ears were flat against her head with uneasiness at this unusual request. Jane held her tightly with one arm and tried to stop shivering and tried to disburden herself of some of the terrific weight of all she was thinking. And a cat might have done the trick. Cats have an admirable reserve, and if one had been curled up neatly next to Jane, it might have served as a credible repository of even a little part of Jane’s grief. But Nellie… Dogs are such trusting beasts that children know early that they couldn’t possess any special wisdom. It wasn’t Nellie’s fault, though. The dog lay there faithfully, understanding that Jane didn’t want her to move. It wasn’t anything to do with Nellie that after a while Jane reached over and took the little bottle from the night table and swallowed the last four pills, then dropped the empty vial next to her under the sheets. In fact, it wasn’t anything to do with anyone, really. It was just that as soon as Jane began to become drowsy, she was seized with the fear that some strange and sorrowful thought might come upon her once more, and she was too tired to bear it. She had come to a moment, too early in her life, when she believed that there was nothing at all to look forward to. Her enthusiasm guttered and went out, but she was powerless against the horrible revolutions of her mind, that malevolent machine, unlike the stupid heart. She took all the rest of the pills because she wanted to be sure that she would not have another thought; she wanted to be sure that she would get some rest.

  Nellie lay there until Jane’s arm relaxed and her breathing became light and shallow and she was deeply asleep. Only then did Nellie slink off the bed and down the stairs where she happily polished off the pâté, the meringues, smoked turkey, and Boone County ham she had smelled from upstairs as she lay very still until Jane didn’t need her anymore.

  And Jane didn’t turn in her deep sleep, but she straightened out to her full length. At age eleven Jane was five feet four inches tall and weighed 118 pounds. She had developed a certain tolerance, too, for the narcotic she had swallowed. When she finally woke up late the next evening, and in the several days thereafter of feeling sleepy and sick and hung-over, and of having Claudia murmur vaguely about her flu, Jane left behind everything of childhood. She had become old without accumulating a personal history, but the very lack of it in her life permitted her to control her destiny more than most. Jane took upon herself the task of directing her own life, and she proceeded with great caution. She had lost forever the ability to fling herself blindly into imaginative hopefulness, and she had lost the capacity ever to experience joy, because she had learned too early a hard truth: During every instant of her life that she was happy she understood implicitly that in the next instant she might be miserable. In this knowledge there was a great deal of serenity; she never doubted for a moment that the worst could happen.

  12

  That late Christmas afternoon while Jane was making her journey up the hill, Claudia and Avery slept soundly. They didn’t hear Jane come in; they didn’t know when night fell; they had retreated into sleep. They lay apart on the wide bed, and they had not made love; but even deeply asleep each one was conscious of that other body nearby, and they lay comfortably at ease with the tall windows along the wall next to the bed losing light in dusky gradations so that at first they had been dimly lit, those two antagonists, and then only their pale skin was luminous in the darkening room, and finally the dark was complete, as if the day had covered them over. Only sound and scent were left, although outside, there was some moonlight that fell straig
ht down and did not cross the sills of the little domed house. The house sat ominously exclusive under the bare black trees and in the center of the snowy meadow.

  Claudia awoke first, unaware of what had awakened her. She realized slowly, as she came awake by degrees, that her legs were uncomfortably entangled in her wide velvet skirt and the bodice was too binding for sleeping. She sat up to unbutton all the tiny, covered buttons down its front and got up to drop the dress over a chair on which she had left her filmy red robe early that morning. She took off her bra and pants and slipped the robe on in the chilly room, and she moved slowly in the dark, with sleepiness still upon her.

  All she thought right away was that it must be very late, but then, almost simultaneously, she felt a twinge of regret at the muffled images of the afternoon that were emerging at the back of her thoughts, and she was relieved that whatever else, Avery was there on the bed. But there were so many things that were hard to think about that she did not let any clear idea of the Christmas afternoon come back into her mind. She wanted to go back to bed, but first she put her hand out to touch the wall so she could guide herself out of the room in the dark and into the hall where the light filtered up the stairwell enough to enable her to see.