The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  “The ladies are going to join us, Mark,” he said. “Now what can I get for you two? Janie? A scotch? Join me with a beer? What’ll it be?” He made a great pretense of surprise when she just smiled uncomfortably at him.

  “Now, Janie! You’re eighteen, aren’t you? You’re so glamorous these days. And you won’t keep me company? You make me feel awfully ashamed of myself. Dissolute!” He spoke to her in the wheedling tones of a host whose hospitality has been spurned. Jane didn’t know anything to do but just smile at him. He clapped his hand to his forehead in a pantomime of surprise.

  “Oh, Lord! What am I thinking of? Virtue is visiting us. Now you certainly won’t catch Virtue swilling the devil’s own brew!”

  Jane regarded him solemnly and didn’t answer. Vince was referring to the Halloween party she had come to in this house, and at which she had been so happy until she had caught on to the fact that her parents had somehow stepped out of the bounds that delineated appropriate behavior in society. But she had never understood what her parents had done.

  The day of that party had been a day that Jane had put away in her mind in parentheses, bracketed by lesser moments, as a fleeting definition of her parents’ marriage. Early that morning she had stopped and stood in the bathroom door while her father was shaving and her mother was sitting in her brilliant red robe on the edge of the bathtub, smoking a cigarette and gesturing as she spoke, so that her billowing sleeves followed her quick hands in a diaphanous accentuation.

  Jane had known right away that they would have a good day. There was that current of animation and pleasure running between Claudia and Avery. They were filled with a glistening and elusive exuberance that puzzled Jane but was mesmerizing, also. She could only grasp the essence of their good humor now and then, and not with language; it was her instinct that informed her in this case and led her along into the same high spirits. When this temperament settled over her household for very long, Jane was relieved and agitated at once. She would have liked to know that pleasure. No couple could be as delighted with themselves as her parents sometimes were. No other two people she had ever seen were capable of enjoying each other so much, and oddly enough, when her father didn’t have a single drink and her mother’s affability overcame her melancholy disorientation, Jane sometimes fell into a brooding sense of dissatisfaction with everything around her. But on the morning of the Halloween party she was pleased to see her parents’ enthusiasm because she was so excited herself.

  “But I can’t think of anything to go as,” Claudia was saying when Jane stopped at the door. “Maybe someone out of Greek mythology. That would be easy enough to do with sheets. I think we have enough white sheets. And sandals.” She settled back to consider this, bracing herself comfortably by putting both hands on the rim of the tub, and the puff of her sleeve slowly settled around her wrist perilously close to her burning cigarette.

  Avery had stopped in the middle of shaving and was staring at himself in the mirror. He put his razor down on the counter by the sink. “Now, wait,” he said, still looking directly at his own reflection. “I think I know what we can do. Now just wait a minute.” He slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his T-shirt so that the body of the shirt hung around his neck. He studied himself carefully in the mirror, leaning forward to peer closely at his own face. He took hold of his T-shirt at the back of his neck and stretched it up to cover his hairline and ears and circle under his chin.

  “A wimple! See! It’s perfect.” He turned around to face them, and he looked absolutely unlike himself. The shirt was taut across the top of his head and the upper part of his lean face, and then it draped in soft folds beneath his chin and onto his shoulders. It robbed his face of that sharp charm that he possessed, a quizzical look of irony, and he seemed unusually benign and sweet natured in a dim-witted way. Both Claudia and Jane laughed.

  “That’s wonderful! That’s just wonderful!” Claudia said, and even Avery’s smile, which always curved up a little more on one side of his face than on the other, was transformed into a simpleminded, beatific beaming. Claudia was entranced and immensely pleased. She got up and walked all around him to see how he looked from every angle. “Okay, okay. That’s great. I’ve got to see how it’ll work for me,” she said. “I know what we can do. Now stay right here for a minute!” And she left the room and came back with one of Avery’s T-shirts for herself, a navy blue scarf, and Avery’s academic robes, which the university had bought in his graduate school’s colors for him to wear during processionals in the years he was teaching. Avery’s robe was a dark blue almost the color of the scarf. The hood was scarlet and gold, but Claudia undid the buttons that attached it. “Some nuns dress in blue, don’t they? I think so. They must. There’s that ad on television with a nun riding a bicycle, and she’s wearing blue, but it’s brighter than this.” She reached up to fix the scarf over Avery’s head as a veil. “I wonder how they keep these things on. I’ll pin it somehow. This blue will be all right, don’t you think? I’ll have to borrow an undergraduate robe and go in black. Avery, you’ll have to call the custodian and see if he’ll get one out of storage. I think this will be all right. I think this will be exactly right!”

  They spent the day assembling these disguises. Jane went everywhere with Avery; he was such a pleasure to be with when he was benevolent with cheer. They picked up the black robe Claudia wanted and went to K mart to buy a black scarf to go with it, but they couldn’t find one. All the scarves were printed in brilliant designs, but Avery was undaunted and on the alert in every direction. He was delighted when he spotted a revolving rack of sunglasses. He rotated the stand slowly and considered the glasses with great concentration, and he finally selected two pairs with plain octagonal wire rims. Standing right in the aisle, he twisted the frames gently until he could remove the plastic lenses. “Janie, nuns wear these sorts of glasses, don’t they?” he asked her, although he was going to buy them anyway.

  “I’ve never seen a real nun,” Jane said. “I can’t remember if the nuns in TV shows wear glasses or not. What should I go as? I don’t think I can go as a nun, too. We have to go as a family. I mean we have to dress as a group. Something that all three of us could be.”

  Avery still worked with the wire frames of the glasses, holding the four abandoned lenses in his palm, but he looked startled. He was clearly taken aback, and he didn’t say anything for a minute until he had adjusted the frames to his satisfaction, and he held them out to show Jane. He had bent the frame of each eyepiece into a shape that was pointed at its center but then curved outward on either side to the bottom edge, which went straight across.

  “Gothic arches,” he said, and he put on a pair so she could see how they would look. The points of the arches reached the middle of his eyebrows; it was a nice effect. He was abstracted, though, and forgot to take them off.

  “The child of two nuns… let’s see… what could two nuns possess? Not chastity. That wouldn’t be any good, would it? That would be pretty predictable. What about virtue? That would be right, don’t you think? You think that would work?” He looked very concerned as he studied her through the empty wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Oh, yeah. That’s good,” said Jane, although she wasn’t sure about this idea at all; she wasn’t sure she understood it.

  He took off the glasses and folded down the earpieces with care, leaving the price tag on for the checkout girl. “We could do that with a white sheet. We need a ribbon, though, and some paint. Gold.” Her father was lost in his idea, and she followed along behind him while he bought three yards of stiff wide purple ribbon and two yards of plain black cotton fabric for Claudia’s veil. He finally found some metallic gold paint in the craft section next to the macramé materials.

  That evening after Avery had brought home dinner for them all from the drive-through at Burger Chef, he and Claudia fashioned a flowing white robe for Jane from a twin-sized sheet. From shoulder to waist, Miss America style, they pinned the purple ribbon on which Claudia had painted
in the shiny gold paint “OUR OWN REWARD.” At the party that night, when Jane and Diana were by themselves, Diana pressed her about this costume, but Jane was disdainful.

  “I’m Virtue, Diana. If you don’t understand it, you just don’t have any sense of humor. Virtue is its own reward, you see!” She was so snappish that Diana didn’t argue. She and her family had dressed as Mouseketeers, with Mickey Mouse hats from the dime store. Another family had come as Little Orphan Annie and Daddy Warbucks, and they had dressed their four-year-old daughter as Sandy, the dog, but they had taken her home early to stay with a sitter. Some people had not dressed in costume at all. There was a man in a leopard-printed bathing suit with a woman in a sarong, and Jane finally figured out that they were Tarzan and Jane. All in all, though, she thought her own parents had come up with the most interesting costumes.

  She and Diana sat in on the grown-ups’ party for a little while, and Jane watched the couples dancing and thought that her parents looked wonderful and exotic, swaying across the room together with their robes flowing around their legs and their veils swinging behind them. When Avery had come to get Jane to dance with him, she had been thoroughly glad to be connected with her father and her mother. She listened to her father being clever and pleased with the things he said. When Maggie said to him that his costume was ingenious and asked whatever had made him think of it, he had grinned at her wholeheartedly.

  “What could be more appropriate? I’ve taken the veil to save my family from disgrace. Now I can confess and go to heaven! It’s your costume that is ingenious, Maggie,” he said. “I wouldn’t have thought of it. You look just right. You’re the quintessential Mouseketeer!”

  Across the room her mother had taken off her veil and wimple but was still wearing the glasses with her hair fluffing around her face as she laughed and gesticulated. Claudia was elated, too; she and Avery were alight with energy, and in any corner where they were not the party palled and went limp. That’s how it looked to Jane.

  Later in the evening, however, Maggie had come to find Jane and had leaned down to her in an attitude of worried affection. She was still wearing her mouse ears, and her short hair spiked out around the edge of the black felt cap in a way that exaggerated her look of concern. “Janie, why don’t you sleep over with Diana tonight?” she had said, leaning forward in a sort of insistent entreaty. That particular night Jane didn’t want to be away for even one second from her glowing parents, and she gazed at them across the room longingly; she didn’t want to insult Maggie, either.

  “I have to get up really early in the morning to practice my violin,” she said. “I have a lesson at ten o’clock.”

  Maggie had shifted her position slightly, straightening up and then bending protectively over Jane again with her arm across Jane’s shoulders. Her voice became more brusque, her intention more determined. “Look, Jane, you really should spend the night here. Sweetie, your father’s had a lot to drink.” She looked straight at Jane, and Jane held her face utterly still; she didn’t let her expression change in any way, but she was shocked. Maggie had spoken to her so matter-of-factly, as though she could ever have the right to make such a comment. Maggie had spoken to her as if Jane were just anyone and as if her father were just anyone. Just people Maggie happened to know. Jane was learning early in her life that in order to like most people, she had to ignore most of what they said and did.

  “It’s really nice of you to ask me,” she had said, “but I’m afraid I can’t stay over tonight.” Jane’s intention had remained firm, although she had been as overwhelmed then as she was now, sitting in Vince’s study and being cheerfully teased about her costume. Teased in a way that she suspected was somehow an indictment of her whole family. The emotion that began to creep over her as she listened to Vince’s banter was almost like the disheartening pang of homesickness. She was touched suddenly by a loss of hopefulness; and since she counted on the Tunbridges to be her measure of all things normal, all things in their right proportion, it was essential to her that she evade this encroaching disillusionment. She was restless sitting there with Vince in his study, having to listen to anything he might say, and she suggested to Diana that they go upstairs.

  They found Celeste sitting cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by books and loose papers and notebooks, talking on the phone and making notes. Jane and Diana stood in the hall idly eavesdropping on her until she spotted them out of the corner of her eye.

  “Hey! You two!” She covered the mouth of the receiver with her hand. “Hey, in a minute how about playing just one hand of canasta? Or we could do a hand of bridge again if I can get Mark or Maggie to sit in.” Celeste loved to play cards and was currently trying to interest Jane and Diana in learning bridge. Jane had once heard Maggie say to Vince that Celeste might ruin her grade point average if she didn’t play less bridge. “Or we could play Michigan rummy. We could play that three-handed. One game. I promise.” Celeste’s bedroom was vast and was furnished like a living room, with her great-grandmother’s desk, a reading chair, and a long couch. Jane had been there the afternoon Celeste and her friends had brought in the eight-sided game table and four wooden chairs that were set up at the foot of her bed. Maggie’s whole expansive expression had drawn in with irritation, even though she hadn’t said anything to Celeste; she had just gone on about her business.

  When Celeste turned back to the telephone, Diana led Jane away. She knew that Jane would rather do anything Celeste wanted of them instead of whatever Diana could counter with, and she hated card games with her sister. Eventually Celeste did search out the two girls in Diana’s room, and by then Diana had interested Jane in the idea of glamour. She was pinning Jane’s hair up, unsuccessfully as it happened, but Jane was pleased enough with the new image of herself without hair falling straight down in neat panels on either side of her face. She didn’t pay any attention to the clumps of hair pinned tenuously on top of her head with a bristling of hairpins. Celeste helped them devise disco outfits for themselves out of odds and ends from her own wardrobe, and Diana put a Pointer Sisters’ album on her stereo.

  When the music began, Celeste looked over at them. “I know that’s a song you’re not supposed to understand.”

  “Oh, we don’t,” Jane said. “We don’t understand a word of it!”

  They danced in front of Diana’s long mirror for a while, believing that they looked like the best dancer, the black dancer, on Solid Gold.

  When they were bored with that, they moved on to Maggie’s room where she had set up her easel to catch the north light. She was working with her pastels, and Jane stood behind her and watched. Diana strayed around the room, trailing her hand across the dresser to touch the little bottles of perfume, Maggie’s silver brush and comb, a pair of leather gloves left lying out; she lounged disconsolately against a windowsill, not especially interested in what her mother was doing. Jane would have liked to have the right to browse through Maggie’s room like that, trifling with all of Maggie’s possessions. It wasn’t possible for Jane to retain any suspicion of, or disappointment in Maggie when she was in Maggie’s company. From Jane’s point of view Maggie, more than anyone else she had ever known, had the irresistible allure and completely charismatic quality of unalloyed competence. Competence under any circumstances. It was what Jane so admired; it was what she herself aspired to.

  Maggie had organized the girls to pose for her, so for a little while Diana sat back on Maggie’s chaise longue with her legs drawn up while Jane sat at its foot, leaning against Diana’s knees for support. Maggie was working in quick strokes with charcoal, and before she handed the finished sketch over to them, she sprayed it with fixative and let it dry.

  Jane took the sketch and laid it down on the coverlet of Maggie’s bed to study it. She was entranced by her own earnest stare drawn in with firm lines next to a softer, more hesitant rendering of Diana’s sweeter face.

  “Look at this!” she said. “Just look at this! I look more like Maggie than you do.” And it
was true, because Jane had both height for her age and some grace, and she was fair, although not in the same pink and freckled way that Maggie was so blond. Both Maggie and Jane were tall and thin so that their joints—their knees and elbows—appeared to be marginally broader than their fragile arms and legs. Maggie was not especially pretty. She had a faintly simian look and a rather alarming smile that stretched her mouth too far into a grimace that bared her large, straight teeth. But Jane was pleased as she looked at the sketch. She had always thought that Maggie looked exactly the way Maggie ought to look, and she wasn’t at all sorry to think that she might look that way, too. It delighted and hugely flattered her that Maggie had wanted to draw her picture.

  When the girls finally drifted out of Maggie’s room, just as Jane crossed the threshold into the wide upper hall, she experienced a momentary ecstasy of inclusion. She had a sudden piercing feeling of familiarity that made her want to open her arms and receive every nuance of that sensation, which she perceived as something of actual substance that radiated from the walls, the pictures, the dark wood floors, the people. At the very moment when she stepped out of Maggie’s room, she had a sudden apprehension of the history of the house, its present, and its future. As she moved along the hall she did raise her arms a fraction before she remembered not to, and her aborted gesture was like the flap of wings. For the few seconds Jane was possessed by this phenomenon she was following Diana down the hallway, self-consciously aware of her own footsteps in her wooden-heeled clogs as they clattered across the floors of all the Tunbridge forebears and future generations.