The Time of Her Life Read online

  Jane stared back because she knew so little about this. She had seen her mother be sad, but she had never seen her mother cry from sadness. Now she observed her mother cautiously, and she remembered what Maggie had done when Celeste had come home crying because she had had an argument with the boy she was in love with. Jane did the same thing because it looked as if her mother might die of the loss of so many tears. Claudia made so little noise, and the tears flowed down her face like all the moving water in the world outside. Jane went over to her mother and put her arms around her, although she was afraid of doing this. The two of them had rarely taken the liberty of touching the other. With one hand she turned her mother’s face against her shoulder while her mother cried, and she stood like that for a very long moment in her life. And at that instant Claudia thought that no one could ever be so kind to her again as long as she would live. She cried even more for this miraculous child who had somewhere learned compassion.

  “Oh, Janie, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t ever plan on doing things, you know. I don’t know what to do about Avery.”

  That evening from the phone in her father’s study Jane called Maggie to say that her mother had the flu and hadn’t been able to shop or cook and could they have Thanksgiving dinner at the Tunbridges’. In the morning she woke her mother up fairly early and told her that Maggie had phoned to invite them over for the holiday dinner.

  By Thanksgiving day there had been three days of mild but steady rain, the kind that in the spring is called a million-dollar rain by the farmers. In late November, however, when the ground had begun to freeze, it was disastrous, especially on top of the melting ice, and there were flash flood warnings for the low-lying areas. But as the rain droned on that afternoon, Claudia came fully back to attention. She took notice once again of exactly what she was doing, although she was groggy with the recollection of the past week that had moved by her while she wasn’t counting the time.

  She wasn’t sure, as she stood there whisking lumps out of the gravy while Maggie drained the green beans, if the Tunbridges had invited her to dinner or if she and Jane had simply turned up in their kitchen. It never mattered in Maggie’s household, and Claudia took care with the gravy and was simultaneously almost at the point of tears with gratitude at having friends so capable and generous. Maggie’s house at Thanksgiving was always filled with interesting strays, whom Maggie had collected from one place or another. People to whom, at some time, she had offered solace. Claudia was dazzled, as she usually was by any Tunbridge event, and she beheld the scene with a liquid and blurred perception.

  Maggie could orchestrate confusion; she had mastered the art of turning chaos into spontaneity—the shade of difference between the two was so very pale. Claudia admired her as she managed the kitchen. She was tall and lanky and lovely-looking in her straw doll kind of awkwardness, thought Claudia. Maggie would motion with her sharp hands and arms and scissor across the kitchen in long strides, never wasting a movement. She marshaled her forces with sweet efficiency. She nudged people gently this way or that. It had turned out that there were fourteen people gathered at her house for this meal, and they had grouped themselves either in the kitchen or in Vince’s study, where the football game was turned on. Jane and Diana had been helping all morning, and now they were sitting at the kitchen table out of the way eating slivered, toasted almonds. Claudia was filled with a fragile, sentimental delight when she took into account her daughter sitting at the table seeming content while Maggie deftly directed all the movements in this sturdy household.

  Claudia did notice with a twinge of sorrow that Jane’s hair was hanging limply around her face and needed washing and that she was wearing a pair of old jeans and an orange sweat shirt that said “Missouri Tigers.” Diana sat next to her at the table in the same attitude of clumsy repose, but Diana was as smooth and polished in the way she looked as a satin-textured stone taken from a stream. Claudia studied her briefly and tried to figure out how she had achieved it. It might be her shiny dark hair braided down her back. This was the sort of detail of other people’s style that Claudia always tried to remember and get right, but that generally eluded her because she could never sustain her interest.

  Maggie was talking to Alice Jessup, who also taught Mark violin and who had interested Claudia for some time. Claudia was always bemused by the intensity of this young woman’s presence. She had come to Avery four years ago to enlist his aid in finding a publisher for a little book she had done on teaching techniques—modified Suzuki for older students. To everyone’s surprise it was becoming a standard text, and Alice was invited all over the country to demonstrate and teach master classes. Avery had persuaded her to teach Jane privately, and she had taken on Mark, too. Since then she had become a sort of pet, a mascot, of their rather limited social circle.

  Alice was dark and small and frail and serious. She had on heels today, so she didn’t seem quite as tiny, but the shoes were an old, scuffed pair worn down at the outside, and her ankles bowed out ever so slightly like a child dressing up in her mother’s clothes. Usually she wore flat-heeled, soft Chinese shoes that buckled across the instep. They were very fashionable these days, and both Jane and Diana had bought a pair in admiration of the violin teacher. But on Alice Jessup the little black strapped shoes looked like the shoes of a good little girl. Alice was so slight, in fact, that with her long, long hair she was often mistaken for a student, even at the grammar school where Maggie had persuaded the school board to apply for a grant that would allow the school to pay Alice to teach orchestra. Whenever she smiled, it was only a tiny break in her otherwise determined gentleness; it was only if she had made a decision to smile, or so it seemed to Claudia. She was a good instructor, though, coaxing the very best efforts from her students by the sheer force of her humorless devotion to the instrument. She and Maggie were at the forefront of the nuclear freeze movement at the university, where Alice taught a course in music theory, and the two of them were talking politics.

  “I’ll tell you what I really worry about, Maggie. Well… you know… despondency overwhelming the whole movement,” she said. They were such a contrast. Alice was utterly motionless as if she had concentrated every ounce of her being into a single stream of thought. It was endearing to Claudia to watch this fragile, reedlike woman toss her thoughts into Maggie’s wake. Maggie was in motion all over the room.

  “I think people will stay more involved than you think,” Maggie said. “Especially now that the people are the only ones who have the ability to define reality.” She glanced at Alice, who remained stock-still with the effort of sorting out what Maggie meant. “What I mean,” said Maggie, “is that they can define sanity, at least in this issue. The man in the street, don’t you think? I mean, it’s gone beyond being complicated. Well, it’s so complicated that it’s become simple. Are we really talking about deterrents with nuclear weapons? How complex does disarmament have to be? And is it even possible? We’ve reached a point where anyone’s opinion on what’s possible and what’s rational is pretty valid, you see.” Maggie was tossing the beans in butter and chopped parsley in a large skillet with one hand and with the other she reached for the serving bowl and put it in the oven to warm.

  Alice stood staring at the floor in concentration, drawing her eyebrows together and biting her lower lip. She glanced up earnestly at Maggie’s profile. “In the middle of an economic depression it seems to me that people aren’t going to be able to concentrate on something that’s basically abstract. A philosophy,” she said.

  “Oh, I think you’re wrong,” Maggie said. “In fact, if anything, the strain on the economy will fuel the freeze movement. It’s something for people to pin their hopes on in an otherwise hopeless situation. And don’t you think that the freeze movement gives the ordinary person a feeling of autonomy?” She emptied the beans into their dish and placed them on the counter. “But not to worry, anyway,” she said. “I heard on the radio that this whol
e depression is only a glitch!” Maggie laughed, and Claudia smiled from her corner of the stove where she was still whisking, but Alice was solemn. “What in God’s name is a glitch?” Maggie asked the company in general. “What do you think?” she went on. “I love it, don’t you?”

  Jane rose up on one knee that had been tucked under her on her chair. “I know, Maggie. I know! It’s like a word game we have at school. Now, if a depression is a glitch, then it must be a gloomy bitch. A gloomy bitch! A glitch! Like in the cafeteria beef stew is barfew, and vegetable soup is vegoop!”

  Maggie and Claudia both laughed, and Alice didn’t seem to have heard, but Maggie was surprised as well as amused. Her wariness was apparent, and she looked to Claudia for a reaction, but Claudia was entirely pleased that her daughter was so clever.

  Mark and Vince were in the room, too. Vince was leaning against the door, waiting to carry in the turkey, and he smiled, with his long blue eyes slightly squinted into the brightness and turmoil of the kitchen.

  Jane had everyone’s attention, and she became agitated with the pleasure of it. “And a gritch,” she went on to say, “is a grinning bitch, right? And a snitch is a snobby bitch, and a litch is a lazy bitch…”

  “I think a litch is more likely to be a female lech,” said Vince in his lovely voice that had a hint of a nasal drawl. Whenever Vince spoke, he always had the effect of slowing down the pace of the conversation. His speech was lazy with what seemed to be suppressed amusement.

  “A glitch is a computer term for a hang-up,” Mark said.

  Maggie gave them a blank glance and then smiled a little at Jane in the way of consolation. “That’s enough,” she said just to Jane, although it certainly wasn’t a whisper, but then she enlarged her voice to include the room at large. “All right. Everyone has to fetch and carry! I want to get these things on the table before everything gets cold.”

  But Jane had got up and was moving around Maggie, trying to regain her attention in a ragged sort of dance of attendance. Maggie looked at her with a quick, preoccupied smile. She was handing various things to various people to take into the dining room.

  Jane went on. “A fritch would be a French bitch, and a slitch would be a sloppy bitch, and a flitch would be a flirting bitch…”

  Jane’s voice was strung out high and thin with a groveling anxiety, like Nellie when she whined, and Maggie was very calm and deliberate. “Jane, don’t say any more about it. All right? It’s not appropriate.” And Jane’s mouth closed immediately into a straight, tight line.

  Claudia was so surprised that it took her a moment to understand what Maggie had said to Jane, and then it rankled. She thought Jane was perfectly equipped to define what was or was not appropriate, just as Maggie thought that the man in the street was equipped to define what was sane.

  The dining room of the Tunbridge house ran the whole length of the original building, and there were always shadows in the high corners of the room no matter what the time of day. When Celeste lit all the candles she had lined up down the center of the table, the shadows became a formidable presence, and the light flickering on the panes of the French doors and long windows showed up the streaming day outside. The table glinted with silver and crystal and candlelight, and the guests took on the aspect of refugees who had washed up at long last to the safest of harbors.

  “You used the bone-handled silver, Celeste,” Maggie said. “It can’t go in the dishwasher, you know? We can’t even leave it to soak.” Most of the guests had seated themselves, but Maggie was still all around the room in a flash. The unexpected illusion created by Maggie’s astringent, everyday practicality was that—with minor variations—Maggie’s family was always thus: blessed with abundance and irradiated by this shimmering light while the rest of the world might weep with rain.

  “We’ll clear and wash up,” Celeste said. “You cooked. Mark and the girls can help.”

  Celeste had set the table with the bone-handled silver and tiny salt dishes with miniature spoons from which the guests invariably poured too much salt all at once upon their food and had covertly to redistribute it with the blades of their knives. She had spread an aged damask runner the color of ivory down the center of the table and made an elaborate and sumptuous arrangement of apples and nectarines, pineapples, oranges, kumquats with their green leaves still on, and clusters of dark purple and pale green grapes. “Don’t worry,” she had said to her mother when Maggie had been distressed about all the bags of fruit she had brought home from the store. “It’ll save you making dessert. I bought cheese, too.” Celeste had spent the morning on this project, using toothpicks to anchor any piece of fruit that had rolled loose. The ten silver candlesticks stood in a row amid the apples and grapes, and Celeste had tied a bow of shiny gold ribbon around each white taper.

  It was a jubilant gathering; each person felt so singularly celebrated. Mark moved around the table pouring wine while Vince carved the turkey. Only Jane, still anguished over Maggie’s reprimand, gazed with pallid interest at the long table. When Diana reached into the centerpiece to take kumquats for them both to eat while they waited to be served, Jane shook her head that she didn’t want one. Jane was sitting next to Miss Jessup, who was at the end of the table on Maggie’s left. Maggie was sitting down, too. She had finally settled into her chair like a gaunt bird, with her hair feathering out around her head, but as the plates were passed to Vince for turkey, she leaped up again to preside over the sideboard. She removed the lid of a casserole and peered into the steaming dish of red cabbage and chestnuts in wine, and she stirred it a little with her serving spoon. It was the only experimental dish she had made for this meal; every other thing was exactly what she had cooked for this holiday year after year. She had even made the ginger pudding despite all Celeste’s fruit. But this cabbage worried her.

  “Now at least try this cabbage,” she said, as if all the thirteen other people seated at the table were her favorite children. “It’s Julia Child. It really isn’t anything at all like real cabbage.” Everyone was amused, and in this endearing way of hesitant apology she ensured that each guest would savor the pungent cabbage. Maggie had worried about it all morning, and Jane had been her ally in the face of Diana’s scorn. It had been Jane who had arduously peeled the chestnuts and bobbed at Maggie’s elbow with assurances of how good it smelled. Jane had hovered and helped and tasted while Maggie assembled this incredibly complicated peasant dish.

  There were too many guests for the conversation to remain general. Maggie, at her end of the table, had enlisted Alice to help explain the music program in the public schools to William and Sally Fitzgerald, who were on Maggie’s right. The Fitzgeralds had moved to Missouri from California and had arrived exactly two days ago. Will Fitzgerald was joining Vince’s law firm, and he and his wife were listening to Maggie while also appeasing and diverting their disoriented and cranky eighteen-month-old daughter. The little girl made determined lunges at the gold-tied candlesticks each time her parents released her hands. Without seeming to notice their distress Maggie chatted on while she reached out and moved aside the three candles within the child’s orbit. She plucked two lady apples from the arrangement in front of her and held them out to the little girl, who studied them with suspicion but then took them both. Now that each of her hands was engaged in the effort of holding onto those apples her parents began to eat their dinner with alacrity while Maggie carried on the conversation. That little girl knew she had been tricked in some way, but each time she put down one of the apples, Maggie made a mock grab at it so that the child snatched it back again with a shout of triumph.

  As she listlessly moved a piece of turkey from one place on her plate to another, Jane was watching Maggie and that baby. She ate some beans and looked at Diana’s plate to discover that Diana was waiting for a second helping. A new kind of exhaustion was overtaking her, as though she were a windup toy running down. She recognized the heavy pressure behind her eyes, and she didn’t want to cry. Her lower lip began to tre
mble uncontrollably.

  “I think I’m going to be sick, Maggie,” she said all at once and with some belligerence. The prospect of someone throwing up quieted the whole gathering.

  “I really think I’m going to be sick. It’s this cabbage, I’m pretty sure. It’s all that bacon in it. I think it must be all the fat in that cabbage that’s making me sick.” Jane said this to Maggie not loudly but with determination; her own mother was at the far end of the table next to Vince and Celeste.

  Maggie looked at Jane, whose hair was dank and clinging to her head, and whose sweat shirt was spotted from her efforts in the kitchen. “Yes, you do look terrible,” she said. “Why don’t you go up and lie down, sweetie? Diana can bring a tray up to you later if you feel better.”

  Jane slid her chair back and stood up to leave. “I don’t think I ought to have any more of that cabbage that has so much bacon grease in it. Just some turkey.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. No, I think you shouldn’t try anything but some plain soda crackers until you feel a little better,” said Maggie. That was not the comfort that Jane desired, of course, but no eleven-year-old could have known how hard it might be for Maggie to appear relaxed and magnanimous while serving Thanksgiving dinner for fourteen.

  Claudia excused herself and left the table a moment after Jane did. She followed her daughter and caught up with her in the upstairs hall. In the room designated as Jane’s room Claudia pulled back the covers on the bed and slipped Jane’s tennis shoes off while Jane lay down flat and stiff and tense and not crying.

  Claudia sat down on the end of the bed and tentatively took her daughter’s sock-clad feet into her lap and massaged them gently, running her long fingers along the muscles and tendons of the high arch of one foot and then the other. Jane was tall for her age. She had elegant, narrow bones like Avery’s that Claudia could feel defined under her hand when she clasped Jane’s slender foot. Claudia could discern the broad, round bone of the heel and the rigid sweep of the arch, and on the top of the foot she could feel the distinct delineation of the complex metatarsal bones beneath her probing fingers. The sensation of her own child’s body beneath her hands brought upon her for a moment the most profound nostalgia. She held Jane’s feet tightly to her in the all-encompassing memory of early motherhood. She perceived intensely and briefly a thorough helplessness of exactly the same quality she had experienced when she had paced the room weeping while Jane, at three months, had lain in her crib with a cold, struggling to breathe. Claudia had wept then at her inability to be of any help, and now she sat stunned with the same idea of futility in the face of being anyone’s parent.