The Time of Her Life

by Robb Forman Dew

  Claudia was a quick study. She could walk with a swivel, like C.J. on Matt Houston, or feign Sue Ellen’s bewilderment on Dallas. “Oh, J.R., I’m so confused!” Claudia could become anyone she wanted to, and she utterly charmed her daughter as they sat together watching television in the empty house.

  For the moment her mother had collected all the diverse and free-floating aspects of her personality into one bright stream of energy, and it flowed around Jane and assured and cosseted her. It was the most gratifying thing in the world to be the object toward which her mother directed every element of her piqued and newly delighted regard. Jane thought that she and her mother were having a wonderful time.

  And these days, too, her violin finally did begin to feel like an extension of herself, as Miss Jessup had predicted it would. Jane did not have to collect words and speak them; she only had to balance the bow on a slight angle and with delicacy, and the music came as it should. The sound she made satisfied her, and she learned all the tricks of this particular instrument. She avoided the friction of the poorly glued fingerboard, she used a little more pressure from her bow than she ever had before, and she coaxed forth a very pleasing sound from the mass-produced and peculiarly boxy instrument. The use of vibrato was all at once a perfectly natural thing; it came to her with a miraculous and easy control. She was beginning to know that she had made more than progress. She realized that something extraordinary was happening to her to allow her to play this music.

  Jane stayed at home, and most of the time she was serene and pleased with the smooth days. She didn’t spend any time with her friends until the afternoon she had to go to Diana’s birthday party. She had no choice but to go because Maggie would not accept her excuses. Diana had invited Jane and three other girls over to spend the night, and Jane was comfortable among them for a while and even smugly proprietary as she always was in the Tunbridges’ house. In the late afternoon Maggie asked them to help her ice the cookies she always used to decorate the huge tree in the kitchen.

  “Now listen,” Maggie said, coming a little way into Diana’s room, where the girls had stacked their sleeping bags and were lounging and gossiping a bit disconsolately and with the edges of ill temper beginning to come through. They were ranged around the room, leaning against the furniture or sitting on the bed. “Listen, I’m afraid you girls are going to have to help me. I’m frantic. I’ve got to get this tree done before tomorrow night. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I just can’t get everything finished myself.” Maggie was brisk and confident. She waited for a moment to see that all five girls were gathering themselves together to get to their feet, and then she turned away and went back to the kitchen. She knew they would follow her. It was at that very moment that a final, hard wedge of doubt began to come between what Jane thought and what Jane did. It was not Maggie with whom Jane was suddenly disenchanted; it was the state of childhood itself, the terrible dependency of it, the awful hypocrisy one suffered because of it.

  Jane realized, after spending such a sweet time with her own mother, that all this was condescension on Maggie’s part. Maggie pretended to these girls that they had a choice and were doing her a favor. But when Jane came into the large, crowded kitchen, she saw how carefully Maggie had planned this activity. There were sheets and sheets of cookies laid out on the counters, and on the table were separate bowls of colored icing at each place, and sprinkles and cinnamon hearts were ranged around the table within everyone’s reach. Jane knew, anyway, that Maggie had never needed them for this task. Maggie was only pretending this urgency to avoid any scorn that might attach itself to this diversion, which had always been a ritual part of Diana’s birthday, since it was in December. In case any of the girls might think they were too old for this, now, Maggie had forestalled their complaints, and this cookie decorating would keep them busy until dinner.

  “I’m sorry, girls. I’m sorry,” Maggie said as she moved among them, distributing butter knives with which they could ice the cookies, “but I’ve got to get this done. Mark will be here later to put the lights on the tree, so you don’t have to hang these till after dinner. You can go on and put the hobby wire through them, though. I’ve cut it in lengths for you. I’ve got two dishes to finish. The broccoli and a dessert. I haven’t even decided what I’m going to serve for dessert, and I’ve got twenty-three people coming, so I’m counting on you girls and Mark to get all this finished.”

  Mark’s imminent arrival made an impression on Diana’s friends because he was good-looking and intriguingly older than they were. They gathered around the table and sat in their chairs with an air of detachment. Even their various postures implied their disassociation from the whole thing, as if they weren’t connected with what they were doing. All but Jane, who was disoriented by this easy trick Maggie had played on them. When she took her place, she jostled Linda Barber’s elbow so that Linda’s knife skewed across the cookie she was working on and spread red frosting over the sleeve of her shetland sweater. But Jane just looked at her. She didn’t even think to apologize.

  “God, Jane! Be careful! Leave me a little room, okay?” And Diana and Stephanie and Linda and Heather continued the conversation they had begun upstairs. Jane sat there with a cookie in her hand and felt thoroughly removed from herself and these four friends.

  “I’ve got a terrible headache,” Linda said. “I’m doing the Scarsdale, and I think I’ve got low blood sugar.”

  Diana and Heather both told Linda that she didn’t need to diet.

  “Just three pounds. I’m not anorexic! Don’t get excited.”

  “I think your headache is completely psychosomatic,” Jane said loudly and grudgingly, surprising herself. “It’s just neurotic!” She had no idea why she was so angry at Linda. “Your headache’s all in your imagination.” Jane was there in her chair saying that, and at the same time she was watching the whole world from another angle, and she saw Linda and Stephanie exchange a look. She saw Diana bend over her work to avoid everybody’s eyes, and she saw Maggie stiffen and turn and approach the table. Jane knew as well as anyone that it didn’t matter whether what she said was true or not. It was not the kind of thing these girls said to each other. At the very least it was unkind to Linda, who always lacked the attention she wanted, and it was rude, in any case. Jane knew also just then that she had somehow got so far past her friends’ experience that they could never be of any help or comfort to her again. She didn’t think there was anything about herself that she could ever explain to them.

  “Oh, Jane…” Maggie said. “Diana, why don’t you… No, you have icing all over your hands. Jane, would you run upstairs and get some aspirin for Linda? It’s in the medicine cabinet in my bathroom.”

  Jane moved off through the house, carrying with her a sensation so deep and cold that she didn’t experience it as much as she was possessed by it. She moved by rote; she didn’t think, but when she looked through the cabinet for the aspirin, she also pocketed Maggie’s newly refilled prescription for Percodan. She did this without consideration, also. She didn’t even bother to worry about if anyone would notice that it was gone or whether she would be suspected of taking it.

  Jane stayed to spend the night, but early the next morning she decided to leave before breakfast. From her new and expanded point of view she could see that her departure was a relief to everyone. And now that her mother had come out of some sort of haze of her own, Jane was at least at ease in her company. Claudia never treated her daughter with condescension; she didn’t treat Jane at all as if she were a child, and so Jane came back into herself a little and for the most part was free of that horrifying, omnipotent perspective. Even when Jane was in her own room and Claudia was somewhere else in the house, Jane was not overtaken by that alarming separation from her own actions. She played her music and she was at home.

  In the mornings, when the sun melted the frost off of the little porthole over her bed and the straight beam of swirling light fell across her room, she was sure it boded well and w
as significant. She had tucked the little vial of Percodan tablets into her bottom drawer, but she didn’t take one very often because she was in no real need of the expansive oblivion it brought on. She began edging herself into sleep each night by thinking of the triumph she would have when she played in the school concert. Maggie would be there, and Mark, and her father, and of course, Miss Jessup would be conducting. Day by day her anticipation of this event grew into a conviction of what lay ahead of her, and as long as she was involved with her music, she was in a state of satisfaction.

  7

  Claudia would not acknowledge to herself that she was waiting, but in fact, if there had not been some sort of expectancy at the core of her, if she had believed that her life had come to the point at which it settled, it would have been intolerable to her sensibilities. Suddenly, instead of having to fight off lethargy, she was having trouble sleeping. It wasn’t that her dreams were disturbing—her unconscious seemed to have reached a state of exhaustion beyond dreams—but in sleep she was washed through with a sense of such awful isolation that in order to bear coming back to wakefulness, she forced herself through the process of placing herself in the world. She would envision the house, the town, the state, the country. Then at least she would be located, but so lonely that the sensation of it truly weighed upon her as she lay helpless in her bed, heavy in every part of herself.

  She was beyond dreams, but she was possessed in her sleep by memory, and she awoke without animation. She awoke in a state of grief, as if a death had happened. So she strolled through the nights, smoking and drinking wine. She circuited the house and sorted through the drawers. She cleaned the refrigerator. Nevertheless, she couldn’t entirely escape sleep. She awoke one morning on the couch in the living room, where she had only sat down in the early hours before it was light. She woke up struggling away from an image of herself and Annie Dobbs fifteen years ago sunbathing on her porch roof in Natchez and looking down through the crepe myrtle and across the drive where Avery was mowing the yard in front of his house.

  He was concentrated and methodical, pushing the mower down one long side and then across the front at a right angle, then up and down again while the fine, moist grass flew up and clung to his long calves. When Claudia had seen his face, dispassionately plotting the elaborate checkerboard he was making with the pattern of his mowing, she had felt a terrible, sad lurch of longing even then, at seventeen. She would have liked to capture his attention and lie down with him and lick the little flecks of green from his bare chest and back and down the long muscles of his legs. She had been so filled with yearning that it must have been quivering toward him in the air. She knew in remembering that it must have been a tangible thing, piercing the hot, sunny day. And yet he had gone on tracing the intricate crosshatching upon the ground with indifference, ambitious and determined even in that project. She awoke filled with the sensation of the lush heat of that summer day, and to find herself stiff and cramped in her living room in the dead winter of the Midwest was threatening to her hopefulness. Memories are much worse than any dream. Memory was the worst thing for Claudia.

  She tried to walk through her need to sleep. She tried to keep busy. She made extensive shopping lists and spent one day making chicken Kiev, and she and Jane set the table with the Dansk candlesticks and had a celebration. Jane was earnest and quiet and accommodating, and Claudia had a great need for her company. When they had been sitting across the dining room table from each other eating the buttery little rolls of chicken, Claudia had looked at Jane’s straight glance directed her way and been immensely reassured. She was filled with the deepest affection for her daughter. It seemed to her that the generosity of that embrace Jane had once extended to her reverberated between them. Jane was safe as houses; she was what Claudia counted on most.

  Now and then in the warm little house, when Claudia was taken with a fit of organization, she would call to Jane to bring a trash sack, and she would light a cigarette and begin to sort out another closet or some odd drawer. If the ashes from the cigarette drifted onto the floor, she would tell Jane not to worry; she would vacuum later. If she were standing on a rug, she would simply grind the ash in with her heel.

  “It keeps the moths out,” she would say.

  It was a great help to her to have Janie with her. At times Claudia’s nerves were drawn so taut that she was rendered listless, and she would stop right in the middle of reordering the minutiae that had accumulated in some kitchen drawer. She would stop and consider whatever she had come upon—packing tape, freezer labels—and she would wander off with it, vaguely wondering when she had ever had such optimism that she had planned to date and label the food she put in her freezer. But the next time she looked at the same drawer she would find that Jane had finished the job and left everything aligned and tidy. She thought her daughter was a remarkable person to be so industrious in her every endeavor. A dozen times a day Claudia would pass through the room where Jane was practicing or reading or luxuriously watching soap operas, and she would feel a little better each time. She could even sleep for an hour or two when Jane was up and about and Claudia could hear her moving around somewhere in the house.

  And to Jane those days before Christmas, those cozy days at home, were the longest days of lazy serenity she had ever known. She was right in the house assured that her mother was safe, that things weren’t changing, and that she had no order imposed on her time. All the hours were there for her to shape, and to Jane that was an unusually pleasant condition in the world.

  But Maggie could not leave Claudia alone about Jane’s staying home from school. When the phone rang and it was Maggie, Claudia would hold it to her ear and listen with reluctance. She could not understand why Maggie continued to badger them. Why did it matter to her in what ways the two of them found a small bit of comfort, a little bit of satisfaction in their dome in the icy meadow?

  “Diana is so worried about her, Claudia. Especially since her birthday party. And all her friends are asking about her, too. Do you think this is really a good thing to let her do?”

  Of course, Claudia couldn’t answer her on the phone since Jane was in the vicinity; besides, it seemed to her a very strange question. Maggie ought to know them well enough to see that it wasn’t a question of letting Jane do one thing or another. It went through Claudia’s thoughts occasionally that Maggie was intrusive in their lives in the same way the sluggish, freakishly hatched winter flies were distressing as they lived their short lives trapped between the storm and window-panes, clicking and whirring against the glass.

  Finally she agreed to meet Maggie for lunch and talk with her because she knew that otherwise Maggie might come to the house and worry Jane herself. She had given in when Maggie had said, “Look, meet me for lunch and we’ll talk it over. I can take it as a business lunch. It comes off my taxes, you know.” And Claudia had agreed, but she had wondered, also, if all those little problem-solving luncheons with Vince had been tax-deductible, too.

  She went out into the cold and snow to meet Maggie at Belden’s, and just the effort of getting there was unpleasantly adventurous. She and Jane, for several days, had made only the most selective forays into the world. They stayed out of the way of people; they had gone to a grocery store across town where they wouldn’t meet anyone they knew who might ask them how they were, and they agreed to this obliquely.

  “Let’s go to the Safeway downtown,” Claudia said; “maybe the produce is better.” And Jane would slouch down in her corner of the front seat with only the back of her head visible through the window.

  When Claudia walked into Belden’s in the middle of the noon crowd, she felt horribly exposed, as if all the little nooks and crannies of her sorrowing were illuminated and revealed. To be abroad in the world while harboring these little secrets of loss was oddly shameful.

  Claudia was so taken aback, in fact, as she stood at the entrance behind two other waiting couples, that she refused to give up her coat to the attendant; she simply clasp
ed it around her and shook her head. And the attendant was surprised by her face. He glanced back at her as she moved away. There is a certain masked, waxy, impermeable expression that he was accustomed to seeing on the faces of the crowd that moved in and out of the restaurant when he was on duty. It is a protective expression, a bit arch, carefully nonanticipatory. That was not at all how Claudia looked; her face was so rigid with dread that she was alarming to see. But when she caught sight of Maggie already seated across the restaurant, so bright in a red sweater, so amiable and good-intentioned with her long frame canted sideways in the little chair and everything about her bespeaking kindness, Claudia relented. She smiled, and as she walked across the room, she relaxed and was even pleased at the prospect of the meal ahead.

  They were seated in the modish restaurant at a fragile and tiny table for two under the latticed ceiling hung with a jungle of plants in large clay pots. And throughout the room were partitions made up of small forests of ficus trees in thick leaf and tall, feathery palms. Claudia knew that the plants were supposed to counteract the bleak landscape rolling away beyond the huge windows, but so much greenery in the wrong season made her uncomfortable. Belden’s was relatively new and very popular with a clientele Claudia never saw anywhere else. The rooms were filled with well-dressed men and women in their late twenties and early thirties who seemed to exist only at lunch. Claudia always wondered where these people came from. She never saw them around campus or at PTA meetings or at Kroger’s. She sat there with Maggie while they waited for their Bloody Marys and decided that these people came straight down the interstate from somewhere and then were right back on the highway after lunch in a ritual and bright migration of all the snappy little cars that filled the parking lot.

  After greeting Maggie, though, Claudia was not talkative. She was pleased to be there, and she settled her coat on the back of her chair and around herself like a little nest, but there wasn’t anything she wanted to say to anyone, really.