The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  By late day Jane and Diana sat in the dining room eating potato chips. They curled onto their chairs with their legs tucked under them and leaned their elbows on the table. They were delicate with the greasy chips, carefully lifting them to their mouths with the tips of their fingers and making two bites of the large ones while they looked out at the rain that had begun to fall. It was an odd rain that didn’t streak down out of running clouds sweeping over the region. This rain was pendulous and globular drop by drop, falling over the porch with a sound like cooked peas hitting the porch floor with a pulpy splash outside the shadowy room.

  Maggie came in and joined them at the table without interrupting their silence. The rain fell, and Maggie ate a potato chip and also sat listlessly spellbound by the peculiar downpour. Each drop contained too much; it was an unpleasant sound all around them, a natural obscenity. Maggie took a handful of chips and moved to the French doors.

  “Umm. This looks bad. It’s turning to ice.”

  But Maggie went away to start dinner while the girls set the table, and the weather wasn’t important when the whole family sat down to eat together. At the Tunbridges’ house it seemed to Jane that everyone was the same age, and in her mind there was no sweeter equality. Tonight Vince was irritable, and Celeste was quiet and sulky with fatigue from having spent the day studying. But these were pale passions, nothing to conceal. Jane had never seen any member of this family really angry, and she thought that the knowledge of anger was her own secret shame. By age eleven she had already met in herself the height of any anger she would ever feel again. She hadn’t revealed it, of course, because she still had only the status of a child, but occasionally she was relieved of it vicariously by one or the other of her parents if either one of them happened to say to the other exactly what Jane was thinking. What she suspected, though, was that her fury was a shabby emotion, because it could not be controlled, and everything about this household indicated that a modicum of restraint was the order of the day.

  By the time Jane and Diana went to bed, Jane was sated with fellowship, and she wasn’t sorry to be left alone in the small flower-papered bedroom that she had chosen as her own for when she slept over. It was known by all the Tunbridges as Jane’s room. She didn’t mind being separated from Diana, whose own room was down the hall. Maggie said it was barbarous to deny people privacy while they were sleeping. They had such a big house, she said, that it was ridiculous to crowd people together as though they were living in dormitories. Sleep was a solitary undertaking, a time to muse and dream alone, said Maggie. And after spending a day in communion with that family, Jane didn’t think that Maggie’s ideas were at all unusual or precious. She wouldn’t have known how to think any thoughts like that about Maggie, and if the two girls had slept in the same room, they would have been far more likely to awaken each other and the entire family too early on the following Sunday morning.

  At eleven o’clock Jane put on her pajamas and brushed her teeth and said good-night to Diana. She got into bed and under the covers that Maggie had turned down for her sometime during the evening and began to read one of the selection of books that were always left on the bedside table for her along with a glass of ice water. But she fell asleep within four pages of the first volume of The Book of Three. She had climbed into bed and settled back among her pillows without responsibility of any kind in this vast houseful of grownups, and that was a powerful soporific.

  Jane woke up early, just before dawn, and she woke up alarmed. She lay still for a while, listening for the reason she had awakened. She was too young to care if she fell asleep again, but she did care to calm herself; she did want to lapse back into that same soothing state of mind in which she had gone to sleep the night before.

  Finally she sat up and pulled the down comforter around her shoulders like a cape and crossed the floor barefooted to the window to open the curtains. She was just waking up, and her coordination was slumberous in spite of the shock of the cold floorboards and rarefied air. Overnight all the objects in the room had become just fractionally clearer to the eye, easier to discern in the crystalline atmosphere, but her attention was too lethargic to take this in. She struggled with the drapes, trying to fasten the tiebacks with one hand while holding the quilt around her with the other. At last she dropped the quilt on the floor so she could use both hands, and she settled the tiebacks around the drapes and hooked them in place with exasperation.

  She looked out the window with only a drowsy interest, but when she took in the still dark panorama of the bluff and the river and the meadow to her right, she moved backward a scant step, and then she moved forward again to peer through the glass in earnest. She stood perfectly still, staring out for several minutes. She could not organize the scene before her into any landscape she could recognize.

  The river roiled sluggishly wherever it had not crusted over, and the railroad tracks were furzed with ice. In the meadow nothing moved. The trees did not tremble, and their bright fall leaves hung glazed and heavy from the branches. The meadow itself, through which she had made her way the day before, was smoothed over with ice, sleek and undulating and foreign. She made no sympathetic association to any bit of the earth she gazed out upon. What she saw exceeded anything she might have imagined. The landscape was icebound, desolate, and bruised where it mirrored the barely lightening sky. It slowly came into her thoughts that her parents would not possibly be able to weather such an extremity of climate, and Jane knew that she ought to do something, but she didn’t know what would be expected of her.

  She got dressed and made her bed and packed her backpack before anyone else in the house had awakened, and she sat on the edge of the bed, looking out at the mysterious accumulation of ice, and tried not to anticipate anything at all. She was puzzled the same way she had been the morning her mother had come in and curled up in Jane’s bed with her after both of them had spent a sleepless night appeasing, avoiding, and enduring Avery’s violent raging around the house. Her mother had put her head down on the pillow next to Jane so that her fluffy hair wisped across Jane’s cheek and got into her mouth. On that morning her mother had chatted in whispers, as though anything at all could possibly awaken Avery, who was sprawled asleep in a living room chair.

  “You know,” her mother had said, “I think it’s perfectly understandable that children do the things to their parents that they do. I was reading about a thirteen-year-old boy who climbed up on top of the refrigerator with one of those huge cast-iron skillets,” she said. “He knew his father was going to come home drunk, and he waited for hours. Of course, when the man walked through the door, the boy hit him as hard as he could with that skillet and just killed him.” Claudia had paused to think about it, and she had turned onto her back and pulled Jane’s blanket up to her chin. “I don’t really think that’s murder, though, do you? They aren’t even trying him for murder,” she had added thoughtfully. “They’re calling it self-defense. Don’t you think that’s probably fair?”

  Jane hadn’t responded at all to that. She had tried to sort it out and had never succeeded. She was fairly certain that her mother didn’t want her to bash her father’s brains out with a skillet, but she was just as certain that there was something that her mother did want her to do to make their lives easier. Yet, as far as Jane could see, she was without any power whatsoever.

  This morning, however, as she stared at the ice, she did understand why, after all those nights when she and her mother had taken long drives out toward St. Louis on the interstate to be out of Avery’s way, her mother always turned around and came home in the end. When Avery had thought of removing the distributor cap early in the day so that they couldn’t forsake him, and when her mother had taken the precaution of going to an auto supply house to buy an extra one in case he should do that again—then Jane had finally asked her mother why they had to go back.

  “I don’t see why we have to go home,” Jane had said. “I mean, why can’t we just go to a hotel like Dad does when he reall
y gets mad?” She was curled up in the back seat of the car while her mother had stretched her legs out on the front seat. They had driven around town for a while that night and finally parked on a street near their house while they waited until they thought Avery had gone to sleep.

  “Dad usually stays in a suite at the Oakwood, too, and it’s really nice. We could go there.” Jane adored being with her father when he was away from her mother and when she visited him in the nice rooms of a motel. Whenever he moved out, he and Claudia channeled information to each other through Jane, and they set up a pattern so that Avery would meet her twice a week at her music lesson at Miss Jessup’s, and sometimes Miss Jessup would go back to his motel with him and Jane for dinner. Avery would order all sorts of things from room service because Jane loved to have her dinner arrive on a trolley underneath a silver dome that kept it hot. And even Miss Jessup would become lighthearted as they unveiled one surprising dish after another. They would settle down in the room to watch TV until it was time for Jane to go meet her mother in the lobby. Her parents didn’t like to see each other during times like those. Avery had stayed away only two or three weeks at a time, but they had been the nicest times Jane could remember, and she didn’t see why she and her mother couldn’t try the same ploy.

  But when she suggested it, Claudia had shaken her head forward and swung her face toward Jane in a pale orbit over the car seat, moving her hand in front of her to stave off any other question. Jane had been surprised to see that her mother was both angry and shocked.

  “Don’t be silly, Jane. What in God’s name do you think would happen to your father? Where in the world would we even want to go? What do you think he would do?”

  All Jane had been able to decide then was that her mother must love her father, but at last she understood that that wasn’t all there was to it. She had never been sure, anyway, that being in love was the right idea to have about her parents. And this morning Jane knew all at once that she was looking out upon the world the way it was for her parents. It was a place in which there was no refuge for either one of them except the other. Now she needed to be home, although she thought that when she did get home, her father would have left them again. She didn’t think he would stay until she could get there, and she didn’t know how long he would be gone this time.

  4

  Avery left before the ice had completely thawed, and Jane came home the next morning, just a week before Thanksgiving. Maggie drove her home because the freeze and sudden thaw had turned the path through the meadow into a rivulet that flowed straight to the Tunbridges’ side door, trickled between the earth and the old stone foundation, and came sluicing down the cellar wall in a narrow, steady stream of water that triggered the sump pump in the dirt floor. The Tunbridges’ house reverberated ever so slightly even on the second floor to the whir and thud, whir and thud, of its emergency drainage system.

  In the whole of Lunsbury water ran everywhere. The ditch from the golf course overflowed and churned beyond the banks of the Secret Feather River, dislodging and carrying with it debris and ragged sheets of ice that surfaced like tag ends of Ivory soap bars, opaque and dingy. All over town people struggled with waterlogged carpets in their rec rooms, sodden woodwork and water-streaked walls and ceilings in their finished basements.

  Claudia moved through the rooms of the house she and Avery had built, aware of the silky whisper of trickling water. When she put her ear against the wall, she could hear the water sliding down behind the foil-covered sheets of Styrofoam insulation, and she could see there were areas of pale gray carpet that had turned a wet slate color where moisture had seeped out along the baseboard. But Claudia did not struggle with it as her neighbors did. She made no effort to stanch the flow; it didn’t seem to her that there was anything she ought to do about it. The slight stab of elation that had pierced her for a moment when she considered Avery’s leaving had never returned now that he was really gone away from her. And he had planned it this time. She was afraid to let herself remember that it was not the usual passionate and frantic departure. He had considered it with some care. Her elation had been a sensation connected only to possibility, not to actuality. She was as deluged with apathy as her house and the town were deluged with the running water that poured through the gullies, down hills, and under the leaves that choked the square drains set into the city’s streets. There the water paused and spun in tepid pools until it filtered through all the washed-up foliage and found its proper depth.

  Claudia was astray in her own house. She didn’t know about experience, about accumulating it, except on the most elementary level. Her very own history provided her with only a random illumination; she had never learned to cull from it a linear clarity. Because she had never mastered the technique of understanding how she got from her past to her present, she had no way of seeing how she could get from the present to the future. She had no manner of dealing with this loss of Avery, who had been hers one way or another for all the time she could remember. She wandered the rooms in a self-imposed stupor, because for all she knew of her life it was just the living of it with Avery that had required all her heat and cunning.

  Jane occupied the same rooms in an entirely different frame of mind. She worried, and she badgered her mother for information about the state of their lives. She was as relentless as the water in her determination to find a stopping place. But she could not get past her mother’s lack of animation, anger, or enthusiasm. Claudia’s passivity had always been ameliorated by her passionate immediacy, but with Avery gone from the house so suddenly she only drifted, uninterested in the days. It made Claudia cross when Jane pressed her for answers.

  “What will we do? If Dad’s got an apartment, will we have to move, too? I thought he would just go to a hotel. Are we going to stay here? Won’t Dad come back?”

  “Oh, sweetie, he’s just getting settled in his apartment. Of course he’ll be back and forth. He’s got lots of things to pick up.” This was not said to give comfort; Claudia was prickly when Jane asked these questions. They set her in motion. As soon as Jane spoke, Claudia was up from the table or out of her chair and walking off down the hall, where she turned off into the bathroom and took a shower, or into the bedroom and took a nap. The answers she gave Jane were only shreds of sentences tossed over her shoulder as she scurried away from the unnerving insistence of her daughter.

  Mostly Claudia slept and slept. She slept late into the day; she fell asleep curled at one end of the dark red couch, and she went back to sleep in the afternoon. When Jane came home from school, she didn’t wake her mother; she just fed poor Nellie and made a sandwich for herself. She and the dog would eat in the kitchen, and Nellie would follow Jane wherever she went because she was so glad to find someone stirring about.

  Claudia ate now and then during the day. Jane found her plates in the sink and jars left out on the counter, and she put them away before she made dinner for herself. So much sleep had made Claudia’s face swollen, and her skin was blanched white under her eyes. She was irritated when Jane asked her anything that might require her to wake up, and for several days she didn’t answer Jane sufficiently.

  The day before the Thanksgiving holiday began, Jane herself was infected by her mother’s fatigue. She woke up and couldn’t imagine that it would be possible to spend a day surrounded by her friends and answerable to her teachers, so she didn’t go to school, although Claudia didn’t know it. In fact, Jane lay in bed awake while Claudia slept away the morning. When she heard her mother get up and go to the kitchen she followed her there, and Claudia didn’t appear to think it was unusual that Jane was home. Jane settled at the table and began to hector her mother in a querulous tone that Claudia couldn’t ignore.

  “What are you going to do, Mom? Can we call Dad? I don’t even know his number. And we’re almost out of milk, too. We need to go to the store.” Jane was so intent upon this that it made Claudia angry.

  “He doesn’t have his phone in yet, Janie. Maggie called last
night to give me the message. It’ll be hooked up day after tomorrow and he’ll call you. Why don’t you ride over to the Mini-Mart to get us some milk? You could take your backpack and just get one quart, couldn’t you? I really don’t feel good. I don’t feel like getting dressed, Janie.”

  A tremor went through Jane from head to toe, a violent shudder. She could not make a dent on the events that were moving her life along one day to the next. No one asked her advice or even wanted her point of view. She only thought of one tiny way, that very instant, to regain a little control over her own fate. She sat at the table with her hands curled tightly as though she had slammed them against the surface with a thump. They were white and tensely clenched.

  “Don’t call me Janie! I hate being called Janie, and you don’t have the right to call me that!” She jumped up out of her chair and stood in the center of the room, trembling and shaking her head as she spoke. “You don’t do anything! You don’t do anything at all! And I want you to call me Jane! And I mean it. Don’t you ever call me Janie! Not ever again. Don’t you dare!”

  Jane’s fury was so startling that it surprised Claudia out of her hazy lethargy. For one instant her senses registered the possibility that Avery might be gone for good. She had not heard from him except through Maggie, who taught her class in the same building that Avery taught his. She sat up straight in her chair and looked back at her daughter, who was shivering and shivering right before her eyes, and Claudia started to cry with a low moan in her throat. She only sat up straight and cried.