The Time of Her Life Read online

  “Shit!” Avery said. “Fucking shit! It’s not all my fault, you know.” And he paused, shaking his head in a loose, downward motion as though he were trying to jolt into his mind the words that would be what he meant. “It’s just not all my fault! We really aren’t good for each other. We aren’t any help to each other. It isn’t all because I drink!”

  Claudia looked at the mattress and wondered if Avery would rent a U-Haul. She had never thought that this had anything to do with the fact that he drank. She knew that however they were together was really beside the point. Being good for each other or not being good for each other—in their case those things were incidental. She was thinking of a maxim she had had to memorize in her seventh-grade science class. Mrs. Greenfield had made them learn this fact: Adhesion and cohesion are the two molecular forces of the earth. Without adhesion and cohesion everything would fly out into space.

  This was a principle of the natural world that Claudia had never doubted for a minute, and it had never crossed her mind that within that principle lay choice. The two of them were a unit, coherent each unto himself, and adherent one to the other. The universe yawned implacably infinite now that one particle of that entity was breaking the bond. It defied her imagination to picture what would become of them. She thought they might be lost forever, that they might, indeed, just float out into space.

  3

  On that Saturday afternoon before the ice and while the exterminator was still roaming around her house, Jane phoned Diana Tunbridge to tell her that she was coming over after all. They arranged to meet halfway across the meadow so that they could walk back together to Diana’s. By the time she collected her things and packed her backpack she was overtaken once again by that familiar dolefulness that assailed her whenever she deserted her mother and father. It worried her to leave them to their own devices even when she was angry at them. They were still sitting quietly in the living room when she came downstairs, and she stopped in the doorway to say good-bye, but both Avery and Claudia were abstracted, and her mother was a little irritable.

  “All right, then, Janie. You are going?” Claudia raised her hand in a listless dismissal. “We’ll see you tomorrow. Have a nice time.” This was not a wish for Jane, or encouragement. It was what her mother said by rote while her mind was working on something else entirely, and as always, when Jane stepped outside her doorway, she was swept through and through with a peculiar kind of loneliness. She suffered a paring away and sparseness at the very core of herself that left her unhappily disburdened.

  She set out through the meadow, and as she wound down the path through the grass, she saw Diana already waiting under the cluster of trees where they always met. Without considering it Jane slowed her approach to allow some substance of the day to fill her a little. Besides, this was not just any piece of land between two houses; she had invented this terrain at age eight, when her parents had bought four acres from the Tunbridges’ and built their house. The steep path between her house and the Tunbridges’ was of her own making, and it wound narrowly through the high grass. Diana was sitting beneath the Four Trees—four great pin oaks that formed a hollow square. Summer before last she and Diana had buried a cache of candles and matches and a flashlight there in two layers of Zip-loc bags and a larger plastic bag enclosing those and fastened with a twist-tie.

  They had marked the turnoff to the Troubled Rocks with a handful of assorted stones that they had arranged to look as if those various pebbles had merely rolled into place there along the main path. Only one or the other of the girls could detect that separate trail so subtly marked through the head-high weeds, and they could find their way along it to a large boulder and some other good-sized rocks that lay in an inexplicable clearing. Jane had gone there alone, now and then, willing herself to sit among those stones even when the low-moving clouds threw her into deep shadow beyond which she could see the sunshine. At a moment like that she would press herself flat back against the boulder, because such a selective darkening of her environment opened out before her an abyss of desolation so extreme that she lost any faith in her surroundings. Most days, though, she was sure that that large boulder brimmed with serenity and that she could draw some of it into herself merely by her own proximity to it.

  “I don’t think we should call them the troubled rocks,” Diana had said when Jane first led her to them. They had spent arduous hours debating these points, naming their landmarks. “I think it would be better to call them the Rocks of Trouble. Because we can come here if we’re in trouble, or if we’re depressed or something. I mean, the rocks can’t be troubled, Jane. What about the Comfort Rocks?”

  Jane had disliked the meter. “No, Diana. That just doesn’t have the right sound.” And she had drawn her straight pale eyebrows together in an unchallengeable expression. Privately she invested those few stones with an ability to suffer or give solace. Pummeled as they were, mute and exposed, tossed into this space by some ancient force—Jane believed in them. When Jane gave herself over to this landscape, she extended the connection between reality and sentiment. Each facet of this world that she had named had personal significance, and she would move through the meadow in a state of exquisite melancholy that was a permutation of nostalgia. Here was order. Here was control. Here was peace, and here was she; she was known.

  Farther on across the meadow was the Secret Feather River, which was a drainage ditch that, over the years, had cut deep, grassy banks down the hill. Two miles away water streamed off the carefully laid planes of the golf course, running off the greens and fairways into unobtrusively placed red clay pipes, through which it was channeled into a cement tunnel and carried along underground, until it poured out into the culvert at the top of the hill and flowed beautifully clear all the way to the Lunsbury Sand and Gravel Works and into the Missouri River. When Jane and Diana had first discovered this stream, it, too, had been hard to name. Jane had first said to Diana that it was the River of Paradise, but that had been met with such condescension on Diana’s part—she had not even acknowledged it as a serious notion—that for a while it had been the Blue Feather River. Diana had suggested that one day when she had found a jay’s feathers strewn mysteriously along the bank. It was a good name, but Jane was always chagrined to give any amount of control to her best friend.

  “If we just call it The Secret Feather,” she said, “then no one would even have any idea that it’s a river or anything. It would be a code, you see?”

  “Why ‘secret’?” Diana had said, and Jane had taken that chance to use impatience to get her way.

  “Because, Diana, it’s our secret that it’s a river!” And that had been all right.

  Along the banks of The Secret Feather, Jane and Diana were sometimes early settlers. They stored provisions in the high coves, and Jane took charge because she had read Little House on the Prairie and the other Wilder books, too. She assured Diana that the television show was simplistic and revoltingly sentimental.

  “It’s really just awful,” she said. “My father calls it Little Shack.” She instructed Diana in ways of gathering wood for winter and berries and nuts. Of course, when winter came, the land died; the grass was flattened under the weight of snow, and Jane and Diana traveled to each other’s houses in the front seats of their parents’ cars, driving the three miles around.

  But on that Saturday in late fall, before the ice storm, as Jane entered her own territory and spotted Diana waiting in the meadow, a slight expansion of herself took place. When she saw her friend sitting patiently under the Four Trees waiting for her, she began to have weight in the world, and will, and determination of a sort. There remained a persistent sullenness within her, but by the time she reached Diana sitting there on the grass, Jane had begun to get a picture of her own self in her mind. She was so much a part of what her parents were as a couple that when she was within her own house, it was almost as if she were entirely erased, although this concept manifested itself only as a feeling she had; it was not a clear thou
ght. Now there ran a picture in her head of herself walking down the hill while Diana waited. In this picture all the future—all the moments which she could see falling one upon another like a line of dominoes—was dependent just upon her own actions, on what she would do next. She was filled for one instant with an enormous sense of power and importance in the scheme of things. She continued to walk toward Diana, but she moved now with more intention, and Diana saw her and got up to meet her.

  They made an interesting twosome. Separately neither one of them was particularly remarkable. They were young girls of an indeterminate age. When they were side by side, Jane looked quite awkward and bony, and Diana looked like a miniature adult. All the parents in Lunsbury with children in this age-group said to each other that Diana would be a beauty, and she was such a nice girl, too, and smart. But when Jane and Diana were together, it was instinctively to Jane that people addressed a collective question: “What can I do for you girls?” “What flavor ice cream cone do you two want?”

  It was to Jane with her stern, slender face and sensibly cut hair that people became attuned to, as people do with a constant, subliminal sensoring. It was an unreasonable attention Jane attracted. Who could tell about her? Her schoolwork was erratic, but her teachers admired her. Her clothes weren’t always coordinated; her tongue was unreliably sharp; her honesty was questionable. She was a puzzle to the parents of children in her orbit because she was stellar. She was a puzzle and perhaps a threat, although grudgingly they, too, admired her. And those baffled grown-ups courted her on behalf of their daughters and even coveted her approval for themselves, as much as they thought about such things.

  Diana brushed grass and debris from the legs of her jeans and walked along beside Jane, attending her in the way any two children can be observed as leader and devotee. They had known each other since kindergarten, and they knew each other’s moods. Diana recognized at once, on that Saturday afternoon, that Jane had about her a bleakness that might transform itself at any moment into mild contempt for Diana or any of her plans. To the west the sky lowered toward them, gray and gloomy. Diana wanted Jane to cheer up; she wanted the sleepover to be fun; she wanted to engage her friend’s interest.

  “Did you see what happened in math lab yesterday?” Diana said, leaning around to observe Jane’s face as they walked. She chatted on, knowing not to wait for a reply. “God! It was Chris Barraclough. Didn’t you see what he did? I couldn’t believe it. I had on my plaid wrap-around skirt. You know. That ties in back. He was already sitting down at the back of the room when I came in, and when I went by his desk, he took hold of one end of the bow!” She paused but got no reaction from Jane. “And then he keeps saying, ‘Diana, you’re in my way. Come on, Diana, I can’t see. What’re you standing around for? Aren’t you going to sit down?’ “ She had imitated Chris Barraclough’s singsong of mockery. Now her voice dropped back into its regular scale. “He really did! What do you think that means?”

  Jane only glanced at Diana with a quick frown of disparagement.

  “Well, Jane! I couldn’t move or my skirt would have come untied and just fallen off. I mean, it was tied in a plain bow. And I couldn’t do anything, because you know how Mrs. Dehaven is. Oh, my God. I was so mad.”

  Jane still didn’t say anything, and they walked a little farther before Diana tried again. “Have you finished The Secret Garden for Great Books? We have to have a report on it by Monday.”

  “The Secret Garbage,” Jane said.

  “I know,” said Diana. “Well, are you reading The Summer Birds instead? I started it, but it was really strange.”

  “The Secret Garbage and The Summer Turds,” Jane said. “Christ!”

  “Oh, come on, Jane!” Diana was finally irritated. Jane could be so tiresome. “Maggie said that The Secret Garden was her favorite book when she was growing up.”

  Jane’s attention was completely engaged for a moment. She so much admired the familiarity of the Tunbridge family, in which the parents were not Mom and Dad but Maggie and Vince, their real names. By an unasked-for and special dispensation she, too, as Diana’s closest friend, had been urged to address them by their first names, and she did this often and with gusto, especially if she was with them in public. It seemed to her that such an intimacy conferred upon her a superior status.

  Diana was in front of Jane on the path now, where it narrowed on the steepest part of the hill, and they continued down the slope without any more conversation, each one mulling over one thing or another. When they drew abreast, though, Jane was more animated.

  “Your hair looks good like that,” she said to Diana in the cautious way she gave compliments. Diana’s mother had carefully braided her daughter’s hair in a single thick brown rope that intertwined luxuriously from the crown of her head to the middle of her back. Green grosgrain ribbons were woven through it to match Diana’s green sweater.

  “It’s a French braid. I really wanted to try it, but it takes hours. I’ll never be able to wear it to school like this.” Diana wasn’t at all worried about that, really, because at the moment she was simply glad that Jane had cheered up.

  They went on to talk about their teachers and their friends and their enemies. To a great extent it was school that shaped their lives and how they spent them, and that was what they were discussing, not frivolously. As their conversation wound out, they became more intense, bending their heads close together, chins down in contemplation. The subtleties and complications of the days at school were endless and delicate.

  And in any case, here were two children who watched the news with attention every night, who knew all the nations of the world and their capitals and their forms of government. Those two girls were beginning to fall in and out of love on a minor scale; they took computer science every other day; they did posters supporting a nuclear freeze for their art project; they were on the verge of having reproductive ability. It might be that they said any number of things that had been said time and time before. They might have a conversation that would bore any thoughtful adult, but what in the world could they have talked about that would not be important?

  In their grammar school, rumors were always circulating that Lunsbury was targeted for a first hit by the Soviet Union in the event of nuclear war. In fact, when all the children were gathered in the classrooms together, or crowding each other in the lunch lines, they took special relish in reminding each other of that very fact in loud voices. It was now and then passed among them as a trophy, a source of some excited civic pride. At night, in their own homes, each child sometimes brooded about the possibility of the vaporization of his or her own parents, siblings, and pets. Each year a few children experienced an early crisis of the awareness of mortality, but they received outpatient treatment at the university mental health facility, and they weathered it as well as anyone does.

  There was no doubt about the fact that being blown to dust was not a good way to die. In the lunchroom over their tacos they weighed it against the desirability of perishing slowly from radiation poisoning or cancer, or even being hit by a car, as a student from their school had been two years ago—“Oh, my God!” they said. “He was just a vegetable for two months before he finally died.” And it came down to the fact that it was only death they were considering, and one way or another it was a subject they were bound to consider eventually. The possibility of annihilation didn’t ever, for more than an instant, lessen the immediate concerns of those sophisticated children.

  And it was never the thought of death that bothered Jane. She spent her energies battling a peculiar hollowness that often rendered before her a setting devoid of depth. Today she finally caught refractions of herself from her friend, Diana, from the tensile grass, from the old oaks too thick to bend but rolling their heads like pinwheels in a crazy spinning of leaves and branches.

  And under the old trees, so buffeted by a low turbulence that their tops seemed to be turning on a fixed stem—under the trees as Diana and Jane walked through the meadow
in Lunsbury, Missouri, those two girls were as much a part of the destiny of the earth as the nuclear power plant that lay fifteen miles away in Fairhill, or the ICBM base seventy miles away in Sheldon. There they were, two girls who might have remarkable lives or might not, might be happy or might not. They were just two eleven-year-old girls walking across a meadow who might do anything at all.

  At the Tunbridges’ that afternoon Jane could not settle down to anything. She was giddy with the effort of trying to appease the odd sense of yearning that had come over her as soon as she had caught sight of the broad brick hull of the Tunbridge house when she and Diana had curved across the meadow. There it sat on the bluff with its wooden appendages of porches, garages, and gabled extra rooms that had been added over the years to meet the family’s needs or to comply with various architectural upheavals. Maggie said that the main house was essentially a “center hall Georgian,” but Vince had laughed and said that it was “just a basic dog run. The hounds run in the front door and out the back.”

  To Jane, the house bespoke continuity. The Missouri River could be seen from the upstairs windows, and across the river trains passed at intervals on tracks that had carried the first train from St. Louis to St. Joe, tracks which the house predated by fifty years. Vince’s family had built this house, and he had filled Jane and Diana with tales of all its terrifying history and secret places when they were little girls, and Jane could never enter the building without wanting to reacquaint herself with every room, its every mystery. But finally the two girls settled down with Vince in his study, where he was watching a football game with Diana’s brother, Mark, who was five years older than Diana.

  The Tunbridge family was divided by appearance into two factions that didn’t seem to be related. Mark, and Diana’s nineteen-year-old sister, Celeste, were their mother’s children, with her amiable lankiness, light hair, and wide-boned friendly face. Vince was shorter than his wife, but he was also perfectly proportioned so that he seemed better made, more carefully put together. His eyes were blue, like Maggie’s, although otherwise he was dark and intense, and Diana, who was so much younger than her siblings and so resembled her father, was like an afterthought that only he had had. But while Diana’s energy was precociously controlled and meted out with care, that same trait in Vince always made Jane anxious when she was in his company. His restraint, his discretion, was tense and palpable. In spite of herself, she was never comfortable with her friend’s father, although he flirted with her and singled her out in any group. Now, when the girls settled in front of the television, he turned his attention to Jane immediately.