The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  The gray winter sky hung outside my window in the mornings, day after day, broken only by the sudden storms, the rare blue of a sunny day, and the screech of the jays and gulls. I looked out as soon as my father woke me, and he would allow me a few minutes of contemplation before hurrying me to get dressed and eat breakfast. He had told me that when we see, we don't really see the object in front of us: we see light reflected from it. I thought about this all winter, every morning, in those few minutes between being awakened and getting dressed. On my knees on my bed, leaning on the windowsill, shivering from the cold, I wondered what that could possibly mean, our seeing only light reflected, and often poked the glass in front of me, or pinched my arm or tugged at my hair to verify or disprove, once and for all, this proposition.

  I was quite philosophical, for those few moments every day, all winter long, until winter began turning into spring outside my window. It was then that I received an invitation to Martha's birthday party in New York. The memory of Martha, the freshness of the springtime air, and the sun, still cold but bright, all blew in my window and made me miss her so forcefully I would have sworn I had missed her every day for months. The card came in an envelope addressed to me, which was already pretty heady in itself. But more important was the return of Martha to consciousness, for she suddenly loomed as large as she ever had, larger—she had become more even than Martha, she had become a New Yorker giving a party on April 12.

  I expected my mother to say that birthday parties were vulgar and refuse to take me, but she surprised me. She didn't say a word against the party. She gave me that hug and kiss on the brow which meant that she forgave me, though for what infraction I need not bother my head about.

  I did get to go to the party. My father was the one to take me. I wore a beautiful beige knit suit that my mother had gotten for me on one of her own trips to the city. It had a pleated skirt and a jacket with coffee-colored piping and brass buttons. It was from Italy, and I knew it was incredibly chic, even when I saw the other girls in their lace and velvet party dresses. Especially when I saw the other girls, I should say, for I looked at them and thought, in my mother's voice, Vulgar. Even then, I was often overcome by simultaneous shyness and a conviction of my own superiority, and this attitude immediately took over upon walking into Martha's apartment. I stood off to the side, miserable and unable to join in any of the games, and absolutely unwilling to as well. There were a great many of these little girls, a dozen at least. They all looked ridiculous to me, unrecognizable, their faces new and unfamiliar and so somehow inferior. And when I saw Martha among them, she seemed diminished as well. She was fussing with some dolls, and I watched her and wondered that I had ever idolized this plump, conventional person.

  Martha looked up at me, smiled, waved, and I waved back and could not imagine what all the summer excitement had been about. I was furious at her. Surely I could not discuss whether what we saw was real because what we saw was just reflected light with this birthday girl. And I had recently been experimenting with whether one could think of two things at once. I had wanted to consult Martha. For example, did it count if you thought of two people, your mother and father, say, or Martha and me, standing next to each other? Was that two things? Or was it just one, albeit a group, a couple? I had imagined Martha and me sitting together on a sofa, just the two of us, talking the way we used to. But I could see it was not to be, and I almost could not see how it ever had been. I left the birthday party early, telling my father I had a stomachache, disappointed and irritable and prepared to write off Martha Barlow as a lapse in judgment.

  The twins had been separated, the branches of the family tree split again, two subspecies of little girl geographically isolated and left to go their own ways. But then June came along, and with it Martha. She burst through our back door as if she'd never been away, as if she'd never lived in a duplex penthouse and played with dolls surrounded by strange little girls. She looked different—taller, thinner. Is this the place to tell you more of what Martha looked like? I think so. Her hair had probably been blond when she was an infant—it was that shade of light brown—and she had odd, narrow eyes that narrowed further when she smiled. Set wide apart, her eyes were an incredibly lucid brown, pellucid is the word, perhaps, for they were quite dark and deep, but also transparent, as if welcoming you into her most private thoughts. Her mouth was large, which I envied, for she could twist it and distort it to great effect. Martha's face had a rubbery virtuosity that did not prevent it from relaxing into real beauty. But it was not the beauty I envied at that time. Her imitation of a snobbish aristocrat was poetry, her upper lip pulled up in disdain, her teeth revealed in a slight Hanoverian protrusion.

  As soon as we saw each other that first day of summer (for the first day of summer, I knew, would from now on occur when Martha appeared), we both remarked on the fact that neither of us wore the sailor's berets anymore or the shorts and sailor blouse. We had stopped independently of each other, and this knowledge drew us closer together. We were both reading Judy Blume novels, and we talked for a while not so much about the content of the books, but about the miracle of coincidence.

  Summer was back, an immediate, intimate time of year, when the world was close enough to touch. It was this feeling of freedom, of timeless, shoeless, ambitionless joy that I began to associate with Martha, as if she brought summer with her, rather than the other way around. I can honestly say that for me Martha existed only in the summer. I dismissed the other Martha and all her friends as wintry apparitions. She took on the inevitability of a season. I still thought about the family feud now and then. I associated that with Martha, too, of course. But each year the feud receded further into that mysterious and obscure adult realm to which I was not admitted. It shimmered there and held for me a gorgeousness, like smoking cigars or drinking whiskey, that I preferred to admire from afar.

  6

  ON THE THIRD MORNING of the voyage of the Thomas H. Huxley, Gloria and I got out of bed before anyone else in the group, and we stood on deck shivering, waiting for the sun to rise. We had done this both days before. The wildlife was almost absurd, a child's drawing: sharks in the sea, gulls in the air. Sea lions leapt through the water. Green turtles floated past the bow. Boobies dropped to the water in heavy, perfect dives. Frigates coasted. Fish sparkled.

  We watched the birds and the beasts in a kind of daze.

  "I don't know where to look first," she said.

  Visitors to the Galapagos always report on dolphins frolicking alongside their boat, and Gloria patiently scouted for them. We had not seen any yet, but we spent those early mornings very pleasantly nonetheless, leaning over the rail, talking. There was a great deal to talk about. In our two and a half days, we had already visited four islands and snorkeled on two dark, rocky shores. Gloria could somehow remember on which island each species had been encountered, and had also managed to read three books. I myself was in a feverish delirium of information.

  As the sky began to brighten, Martha walked toward Gloria and me and gave a chummy little salute. I watched her, the way she kind of strutted, remembering when we were children, when we were friends.

  How do you begin to describe a friendship? Well, let's see: there's mundane, habitual, urgent intimacy. And it's for no reason. I wanted to ask Martha right then why she had stopped being my friend. I wanted to ask her if she would be my friend again. Of course I could do neither. One had one's pride. Anyway, how could she explain the end of something that itself had no explanation?

  "What is the evolutionary reason for friendship?" I said to her.

  "Good morning to you, too, Jane," she said, laughing. "And evolution doesn't have reasons. It's opportunistic."

  I'm sure she knew what I meant, though.

  Martha looked up at the frigate birds that hovered above the boat, their deflated scarlet throat sacs just visible in the new sunlight. She smiled at the birds, magnificent black cutouts against the sky, their pointed wings enormous and absolutely still, their
long tails forked and stiff in the breeze.

  "They don't look like scavengers, do they?" she said.

  She climbed the ladder to the top deck to retrieve the wet suit she had hung up there to dry.

  I thought, You're very stupid, Martha. I am excellent company. See what a fine time I'm having with Gloria? And all around me on this boat are new friends. Well, perhaps not friends. Friendship might indeed be a deviant, a joke of nature, I thought, when compared with this, the perfect adaptation—camaraderie.

  "Darwin had an anthropomorphic side," Gloria continued. She was now reading a biography of Darwin by an Englishwoman named Janet Browne. Her tone was therefore particularly personal and knowing. "Darwin blurred the distinction between man and animal in a charming, gentlemanly, sentimental way," she said. "That's obviously one of the things that helped him overcome the cultural prejudice against an idea like evolution. The English do like their pets."

  I wonder if that identification with the animal world was one of the things that drew me to Darwin when I was a child. Perhaps because we are so close to the ground when we are young, because we are face to face with the family dog, we recognize our common humanity, so to speak. When I was five, I told Jennifer of Jennifer Circle, the odious daughter of the contractor who developed the eponymous property across the street from us, that man was an animal, and she began to cry and had to go home. That surprised me, for of all the information I received from my brothers, man's membership in the animal family was the easiest for me to accept—much easier than the secret of sexual reproduction, for example, which my brothers had also revealed to me, but which I did not divulge to Jennifer, not out of delicacy but simply because I thought the boys were making the whole thing up.

  Was I insufficiently cognizant of the Nobility of Man? Was that the real reason I accepted this subversive information, which so distressed and still distresses Darwin's critics? Or was it that, as a child, a person of not only lowly physical stature but also inferior social status, I was able more easily to identify with my brothers and sisters of the animal kingdom?

  Only someone like Darwin, I think, a member of the ruling class of a ruling nation in its most glorious days of empire, would have the confidence to recognize man's consanguinity with the animal kingdom. Only such a man of wealth and what they used to call breeding, and learning, too, would possess the natural grace and generosity necessary to recognize mankind emerging triumphant from the squirming microscopic jelly at the bottom of his collecting net. And who better to appreciate this imperial Victorian insight into our low origins than a child, both arrogant and aggrieved?

  The gradual evolution of each species was one of those scientific ideas that struck me as thrillingly true when I first learned of it, not through its novelty, but through its intimacy, as if rather than first meeting the theory of evolution, I'd recognized it after a long, warm acquaintance. That the world was constantly changing appealed to me, although it raised new questions. For example: How could you be certain of anything? And on a more personal note, if I was shedding skin, which Fred assured me I was; if I was growing, which I could see for myself, then at what point was I me? Wasn't I just a part of me? Or a different me?

  A rose was a rose when it was just a prickly stalk in the ground, my mother said, trying to soothe me. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, my father inevitably added.

  "But I'm not a rose," I said.

  "And you don't smell sweet, either," Andrew said.

  "Changing your name to Rose? That's wonderful, Barlow, dear," Aunt Anna said.

  I played the violin for years, laboriously practicing, never really making much progress. Perhaps part of my problem was that as I practiced, my finger slipping a hairsbreadth to distort a G to a something unnameable, I would be thinking, How did the G get to sound right and the something unnameable so wrong? Who says so? In chemistry class or algebra or geometry, the laws of nature were scrawled on the blackboard, as clear as day. But to me, they were as arbitrary, as frivolous, as the rules of Parcheesi.

  I told Gloria about my problems with this sort of thing. It was in the nature of a confession. She was, after all, a science teacher.

  Gloria explained to me that I was a nominalist.

  "Lamarck was a nominalist. The Enlightenment was big on nominalism. You're in very good company. You're wrong, but you're in good company."

  In her best science-teacher voice, she explained that a nominalist thinks there are no real divisions of organisms into species, just an endless, gradual arc of individuals. The divisions are no more than arbitrary names given by scientists for their own convenience.

  "I'm very radical, it sounds like."

  "You? I should hardly think so," Gloria said.

  I watched Martha climb back down the steps carrying her wet suit. Then she disappeared into her cabin. She was friendly enough to me, I thought, though no friendlier than she was to, say, Mrs. Tommaso. In a way, I understood and was even grateful. This camaraderie business was nothing to be sneered at—a kind of friendship vacation, all the comforts of home and no cooking! Still, I had occasional unworthy stabs of curiosity about Martha, of resentment and, I must admit, longing. Friendship, that freak of nature, kept limping into view.

  What on earth had I done to her, anyway? I went through the possibilities again. And again. Boyfriend interference? No. We didn't even have boyfriends when I knew her. Insufficient appreciation? Hardly. An excess of appreciation, then? Martha had never minded appreciation, and she had been equally devoted to me. General obnoxiousness? An unintended insult? Did I borrow money from her and never pay her back? Nothing I came up with made any sense.

  When Darwin and the crew of the Beagle first landed in the Galapagos, they were astonished to discover that the birds were so tame they could kill them by hitting them with a stick. I longed to whack my guilty confusion in the head with a stick and watch it fall with a satisfying thump to the ground. We saw albatrosses one day, huge white waddling birds, which may have been what gave me this particular fanciful notion.

  "Martha is my albatross," I said to Gloria. Then I realized she could have no idea what I was talking about. And that I had, at that moment, no intention of telling her.

  She gave me a curious look. "Maybe you're hers."

  "The waved albatross!" I said quickly. "I can't believe they stay in flight for a year at a time."

  "Two years," said the science teacher, instantly distracted from any thought of Martha. "They come to land every two years to mate with the same female. A quaint species."

  I was confused about Martha, but I noticed that confusion in the Galapagos took on an almost global quality, a grandeur extending well beyond Martha to the creation of the universe itself. This intensity conferred on poor old puzzled uncertainty a dignity, and that dignity was in turn reflected back onto Martha. And so, as I mulled over the problem of species, I recognized that there existed between the origins of life and Martha Barlow an important link: the confusion experienced by Jane Barlow Schwartz. This link was extremely suggestive. It seemed to promise some related solution. If A = (?) and B = (?), then all one has to prove is (?). It was obvious. The mechanism that explained the transmutation of species would explain Martha's transmutation, the transmutation of friendship.

  "What is a species?" I said to Gloria.

  "Oh, you know," Gloria answered.

  But I didn't know. The world is an oozing, crawling, swimming, swinging, stampeding, strolling kind of place, reveling in the swarming diversity of its creatures. First we were one, now we are many. Now we are us, and they are spores and pigeons and caribou. How did we come to part ways?

  I realize I have a tendency toward analogy. Perhaps you think that unscientific. Again, I point to Charles Darwin, a serious scientist, a genius, a thinker who changed the world forever. He, too, had a tendency toward analogy. In the conclusion to The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin wrote that because "a number of isolated facts soon become uninteresting, the habit of comparison leads to g
eneralization. On the other hand, as the traveler stays but a short space of time in each place, his descriptions must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observation. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses." Or, in his case, accurate and revolutionary hypotheses.

  As I stared down into the water, I understood with startling clarity the connection between my revived interest in species diversity and my friendship with Martha. First Martha and I were one, now we were two. We had been twins, then we became strangers, now we were something or other, I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Three days had passed, three exhilarating, rather odd days of endemic species and strenuous physical activity during which, when I had time to think about her at all, I had gone from sullen, leaden anger at Martha to peppier rage to the muddled tranquillity of trailing in her wake, in her knowledge and appreciation of every sapless specimen of Galapagos vegetation, every pebble of volcanic rubbish, every feather, every bob of every head of every bird or beast we encountered. So perfect, so distinct, were the adaptations to that arid, barren land, so perfect and distinct were Martha's tales of nature in all its struggles and glories, that for long stretches I quite forgot she had ever been my friend, I felt so friendly toward her.

  "Species," I said to Gloria. "You must tell me. What is a species? That's the mystery of mysteries. Darwin said so."

  "He was quoting from someone," Gloria said. She gave an almost inaudible little sigh, an indication of gentle forbearance that made me miss my parents for a moment. "I've always found that phrase banal," she added.