The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

  Prudie gave her third-period students a chapter of Le Petit Prince to translate—“La seconde planète était habitée par un vaniteux”—and took a seat in the back of the classroom to finalize her notes for book club. (The secret to teaching was to place yourself where you could see them but they couldn’t see you. And nothing was more deadly than the reverse. Chalkboards were for chumps.)

  It was already way too hot. The air was still, with an odor faintly locker-room. Prudie’s neck was streaked with sweat. Her dress was fastened onto her back, but her fingers slid on the pen. The so-called temporary buildings (they would last no longer than Shakespeare’s plays) in which she taught had no air-conditioning. It was hard to keep the students’ attention in May. It was always hard to keep the students’ attention. The temperature made it impossible. Prudie looked about the room and saw several of them wilted over their desks, limp as old lettuce leaves.

  She saw little sign of work in progress. Instead the students slept or whispered among themselves or stared out the windows. In the parking lot, hot air billowed queasily over the hoods of cars. Lisa Streit had her hair in her face and her work in her lap. There was something especially brittle about her today, the aura of the recent dumpee. She’d been dating a senior and, Prudie had no doubt, pressured daily to give it up to him. Prudie hoped she’d been dumped because she hadn’t done so rather than dumped because she had. Lisa was a sweet girl who wanted to be liked by everyone. With luck she would survive until college, when being likable became a plausible path to that. Trey Norton said something low and nasty, and everyone who could hear him laughed. If Prudie rose to go see, she believed, she’d find Elijah Wallace and Katy Singh playing hangman. Elijah was probably gay, but neither he nor Katy knew it yet. It was too much to hope the secret word would be French.

  In fact, why bother? Why bother to send teenagers to school at all? Their minds were so clogged with hormones they couldn’t possibly learn a complex system like calculus or chemistry, much less the wild tangle of a foreign language. Why put everyone to the aggravation of making them try? Prudie thought that she could just do the rest of it—watch them for signs of suicide or weapons or pregnancy or drug addiction or sexual abuse—but asking her to teach them French at the same time was really too much.

  There were days when just the sight of fresh, bright acne or badly applied mascara or the raw, infected skin around a brand-new piercing touched Prudie deeply. Most of the students were far more beautiful than they would ever realize. (There were also days when adolescents seemed like an infestation in her otherwise comfortable life. Often these were the same days.)

  Trey Norton, on the other hand, was beautiful and knew it—wounded eyes, slouched clothes, heavy, swinging walk. Beauté du diable. “New dress?” he’d asked Prudie while taking his seat today. He’d looked her over, and his open assessment was both unsettling and infuriating. Prudie certainly knew how to dress professionally. If she was exposing more skin than usual, that was because it was going to be a hundred-fucking-six degrees. Was she supposed to wear a suit? “Hot,” he’d said.

  He was angling for a better grade than he deserved, and Prudie was just barely too old to be taken in. She wished she were old enough to be impervious. In her late twenties, suddenly, unnervingly, she found herself wishing to sleep with nearly every man she saw.

  The explanation could be only chemical, because Prudie was not that sort of woman. Here at school every breath she took was a soup of adolescent pheromones. Three years of concentrated daily exposure—how could this not have an effect?

  She’d tried to defuse such thoughts by turning them medicinally, as needed, to Austen. Laces and bonnets. Country lanes and country dances. Shaded estates with pleasant prospects. But the strategy had backfired. Now, often as not, when she thought of whist, sex came also to mind. From time to time she imagined bringing all this up in the teachers’ lounge. “Do you ever find yourself . . .” she would begin. (As if!)

  She’d actually been sexually steadier her first time through high school, a fact that could only dismay her now. There was nothing about those years to remember with satisfaction. She had grown early and by sixth grade was far too tall. “They’ll catch up,” her mother had told her (without being asked, that’s how obvious the problem was). And she was perfectly right. When Prudie graduated, most of the boys had topped her by a couple of inches at least.

  What her mother didn’t know, or didn’t say, was how little this would matter by the time it happened. In the feudal fiefdom of school, rank was determined early. You could change your hair and clothes. You could, having learned your lesson, not write a paper on Julius Caesar entirely in iambic pentameter, or you could not tell anyone if you did. You could switch to contact lenses, compensate for your braininess by not doing your homework. Every boy in the school could grow twelve inches. The sun could go fucking nova. And you’d still be the same grotesque you’d always been.

  Meanwhile, at restaurants, the beach, the movies, men who should have been looking at her mother began to look at Prudie instead. They brushed past her in the grocery store, deliberately grazing her breasts. They sat too close on the bus, let their legs fall against her at the movies. Old men in their thirties whistled when she walked by. Prudie was mortified, and this appeared to be the point; the more mortified she became, the more pleased the men seemed to be. The first time a boy asked to kiss her (in college) she’d thought he was making fun of her.

  So Prudie was not pretty and she was not popular. There was no reason she couldn’t have been nice. Instead, to bolster her social position at school, she’d sometimes joined in when the true outcasts were given their daily dose of torment. She’d seen this as a diversionary tactic at the time, shameful but necessary. Now it was unbearable to remember. Could she have really been so cruel? Someone else perhaps had tripped Megan Stahl on the asphalt and kicked her books away. Megan Stahl, Prudie could now see, had probably been slightly retarded as well as grindingly poor.

  As a teacher Prudie watched out for such children, did her best for them. (But what could a teacher do? No doubt she made things worse as often as she made them better.) This atonement must have been the real reason she’d chosen the career, although at the time it had seemed to be about loving France and having no inclination for actual scholarship. Probably every high school teacher arrived with scores to settle, scales to tip.

  Precious little in Mansfield Park supported the possibility of fundamental reform. “Character is set early.” Prudie wrote this on a notecard, followed it with examples: Henry Crawford, the rake, improves temporarily, but can’t sustain it. Aunt Norris and cousin Maria are, throughout the book, as steadfast in their meanness and their sin as Fanny and cousin Edmund are in their propriety. Only cousin Tom, after a brush with death and at the very, very end of the book, manages to amend.

  It was enough to give Prudie hope. Perhaps she was not as horrible as she feared. Perhaps she was not beyond forgiveness, even from Jane.

  But at the very moment she thought this, her fingers, slipping up and down her pen, put her in mind of something decidedly, unforgivably un-Austenish. She looked up and found that Trey Norton had swung about, was watching her. This was no surprise. Trey was as sensitive to any lewd thought as a dowser to water. He smiled at her, and it was such a smile as no boy should give his high school teacher. (Or no high school teacher should attribute such things to the mere act of baring one’s teeth. My bad, Jane. Pardonnez-moi.)

  “Do you need something, Trey?” Prudie asked. She dropped the pen, wiped her hands on her skirt.

  “You know what I need,” he answered. Paused a deliberate moment. Held his work up.

  She rose to go see, but the bell rang. “Allez-vous en!” Prudie said playfully, and Trey was the first on his feet, the first out the door. The other students gathered their papers, their binders, their books. Went off to sleep in someone else’s class.

  “This chapel was fitted up as you see it, in James the Second’s time.” (MANSFIE
LD PARK)

  Prudie had a free period, and she walked through the quad to the library, where there was air-conditioning as well as two computer stations with Internet access. She wiped the sweat from her face and neck with her hand, wiped her hand on her hem, and looked at her e-mail. Kapow to the offers to consolidate her debts, enlarge her penis, enchant her with X-rated barnyard action, provide craft tips, recipes, jokes, missing persons, cheap pharmaceuticals. Kapow to anything with a suspicious attachment; there were six more of these. Deleting all this took only a minute, but it was a minute she begrudged, because who’d asked for any of it? Who had the time? And tomorrow every bit of it would be back. She had la mer à boire.

  Cameron Watson settled into the terminal next to her. Cameron was a slope-backed, beak-nosed kid who looked about eleven but was really seventeen. He’d been in Prudie’s class two years before and was also a neighbor from three houses over. His mother and Prudie were members of the same investment group. Once this investment group had seen some heady returns. Once fiber-optics companies and large-cap tech stocks had hung like grapes from a vine. Now everything was a shambles of despair and recrimination. These days Prudie saw little of Cameron’s mother.

  Cameron had told Prudie that he had a friend in France. They e-mailed, so he wanted to learn the language, but he’d shown no aptitude, although his excellent homework made Prudie suspect the French friend did it for him. Clearly bright as a bee, Cameron had that peculiar mix of competence and cluelessness that marks the suburban computer geek. Prudie went to him with all her computer problems and did her best, in return, to genuinely like him.

  “I’m afraid to send anything from home just now,” she told him, “because I’ve been getting e-mails that seem to’ve come from people in my address book but didn’t. There are attachments, but I haven’t downloaded them. Or read them.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You’ve been infected.” He wasn’t looking at her, leaning into his own screen. Mouse clicking. “Self-replicating. Tricky. The work of a thirteen-year-old kid in Hong Kong. I could come clean it up for you faster than I could tell you how.”

  “That would be so great,” Prudie said.

  “If you had DSL I could do it from home. Don’t you hate being so—geographical? You should get DSL.”

  “You live three houses from me,” Prudie said. “And I spent so much money last time out.” (Cameron had advised her on every purchase. He knew her setup better than she did.) “Just two years ago. Dean won’t see the need. Do you think I could get a substantial upgrade without buying a whole new computer?”

  “Don’t go there,” Cameron said, apparently not to Prudie but to the screen. Although it might have been to Prudie. Cameron liked Dean a ton and would hear no criticism about him.

  Three more students walked in, ostensibly on a research assignment. They punched up the catalogue, wrote things in their notebooks, conferred with the librarian. One of these students was Trey Norton. There was a second boy, whom Prudie didn’t know. One girl, Sallie Wong. Sallie had long polished hair and tiny glasses. Good ear for languages, lovely accent. She was wearing a blue tank top with straps that crossed in the back, and her shoulders gleamed with sweat and that lotion with glitter all the girls were using. No bra.

  When they went into the stacks, they went in three different directions. Trey and Sallie met up immediately somewhere in poetry. Through the glass window of the computer station, Prudie had a clear view down four of the aisles. She watched Trey take Sallie’s hair in his hands. He whispered something. They ducked into the next aisle just before the other boy, a heavy young man with an earnest, baffled expression, appeared. He was obviously looking for them. They were obviously ditching him. He tried the next aisle. They doubled back.

  Cameron had been talking this whole time, talking with passion, although still scrolling down his own screen. Multitasking. “You need bandwidth,” he was saying. “Your upgrade now, it’s not about processors and storage anymore. You need to situate yourself on the Web. That desktop paradigm—that’s over. That’s beached. Stop thinking that way. I can get you some killer freeware.”

  Trey and Sallie had surfaced in the magazines. She was laughing. He slid his hand under one strap of her top, opened his fingers over her shoulder. They heard the other boy coming, Sallie laughing harder, and Trey pulled her down another aisle and out of Prudie’s sight.

  “Like a free long-distance line,” Cameron was saying. “Streaming live real-time video, IRC. You’ll be able to fold your computer like a handkerchief. You’ll be living inside it. You’ll be global.” Somehow they’d morphed into The Matrix. Prudie hadn’t been paying attention and might not have known when it happened even if she had been. The air-conditioning was starting to chill her. Nothing a brisk walk to her classroom wouldn’t cure.

  Trey and Sallie reappeared in the magazines. He backed her into National Geographic and they kissed.

  “Your computer’s not a noun anymore,” Cameron said. “Your computer’s a f-fricking verb.”

  The heavy young man came into the computer station. If he had turned around he’d have seen Sallie Wong’s lips closing over Trey Norton’s tongue. He didn’t turn around. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” he told Cameron accusingly. “We’re all supposed to be working together.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.” Cameron sounded neither apologetic nor concerned. “Find the others.”

  “I can’t.” The boy took a seat. “I’m not going to do anything by myself.”

  Sallie was holding on to the back of Trey’s neck, arching slightly. The air-conditioning was no longer a problem for Prudie. She forced herself to stop watching, swung back to Cameron.

  “I’m not going to do the whole assignment by myself and then put all your names on it,” the boy said, “if that’s what you think.”

  Cameron continued to type. He could spot a hoax in seconds, but he had no sense of humor. He thought the graphics for Doom were totally awesome—his fingers twitched spasmodically when he talked about them—but he’d fainted dead away when Blood on the Highway was shown in driver’s ed. Although this was a fatal step for his high school rep, it consoled Prudie when she heard about it. This was not a boy who would open fire in the hallway anytime soon. This was a boy who still knew the difference between what was real and what wasn’t.

  For an instant, like an ambush, a picture came into Prudie’s mind. In this picture she was backed into National Geographic, kissing Cameron Watson. She deleted the image instantly (good God!), kept an expressionless face, concentrated on whatever the hell Cameron was saying. Which was—

  “What if they changed the paradigm and no one came?” Cameron did something strange with his hands, thumbs touching at the tips, fingers curled above.

  “What’s that?” Prudie asked him.

  “A smiley face. Emoticon. So you’ll know I’m joking.”

  He wouldn’t look at her, but if he had, she wouldn’t have been able to look back. How lucky his generation was, making all these friends they’d never actually meet. In cyberspace, no one gets pantsed.

  “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. . . . The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!” (MANSFIELD PARK)

  Prudie liked the beginning of Mansfield Park most especially. This was the part about Fanny Price’s mother and aunts, the three beautiful sisters, and how they all married. It bore some resemblance to the story of the Three Little Pigs. One sister had married a wealthy man. One had married a respectable man with a modest income. One, Fanny’s mother, had married a man of straw. Her poverty became so pronounced that Fanny Price was sent all alone to live with the wealthy aunt and uncle. Everything changed then into “Cinderella” and the real story began. Someone else had talked about fairy tales last time. Was it Grigg? Prudie had read a million fairy tales as a child. And reread them. Her fa
vorite was “The Twelve Swans.”

  One thing she’d noticed early—parents and adventures did not mix. She herself had no father, only a picture in the hallway of a young man in uniform. He’d died, she’d been told, on some secret mission in Cambodia when she was nine months old. Prudie had no reason to believe this and, in spite of its obvious appeals, didn’t. Her mother was the problem; no matter what Prudie did, she showed no inclination to give Prudie away.

  Prudie’s mother was sweet, affectionate, tolerant, and cheerful. She was also strangely tired. All the time. She claimed to work in an office, and it was this work, she said, that so wore her out that even lying on the couch watching television was sometimes too taxing. She spent the weekends napping.

  It made Prudie suspicious. It was true that her mother left the house after breakfast and didn’t come back until dinnertime, it was true that Prudie had gone to visit her at her office building (though never unannounced) and there she would always be, but she was never actually working when Prudie did visit. Usually she was talking on the telephone. Her mother should try a day at day care! “I’m too tired” cut no mustard there.

  On Prudie’s fourth birthday her mother was unable to rouse herself to the demands of a party at which many of the guests would presumably be four years old. For several days she told Prudie that the birthday was coming up—the day after tomorrow, or maybe the day after after—until she finally gave Prudie a present (not wrapped) of a Sesame Street record and apologized for its being late. Prudie’s birthday, she now admitted, lay somewhere vaguely behind them.

  Prudie threw the record and herself onto the floor. She had all the advantages of justice on her side, as well as four-year-old tenacity. Her mother had only twenty-three-year-old cunning. The whole thing should have been happily resolved in less than an hour.