The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  "And now you've had a reunion, you and Martha."

  "Sort of."

  Gloria came over to my bunk and sat beside me and put her hand on my forehead.

  "Fever or sunburn?" she asked.

  "Sunburn."

  I lay there without moving, except that the boat was moving, swaying and rocking. I wondered why Michael the ex-husband had not worn galoshes. I wondered if Jack did. My father did—big ones with buckles. It seemed a manly thing to do, wear galoshes. How could I have married someone who let his feet get wet in the rain? Gloria meanwhile had gotten two aspirins out of her cosmetics bag. She poured water from a thermos into a glass. I swallowed the chalky aspirins and thought how nice it was to have someone take care of me. Her cool hand had stroked my forehead like a mother's hand.

  "Tomorrow you wear a hat, miss," she said.

  "And galoshes."

  I still felt a little sick after dinner and went right up to bed. Gloria stayed in the dining room to hear about the plans for the next day.

  "We're going to Tower Island, in the north," she reported back to me. "We sail tonight. We cross the equator around three a.m. I asked Martha to wake us when we do."

  "I'm sure she was thrilled."

  "And," she said, "Martha made an announcement that the trip would probably be extremely rough."

  "Ah."

  "She said we should batten down the hatches, so to speak. Well, not 'so to speak' actually, since she said we should batten down the hatches and she meant we should batten down the hatches. We're supposed to put everything loose away. We can't leave anything heavy on the shelf above the bed, and she said, if you can believe it, to tuck your blanket in really tight to hold you in the bunk..."

  As she spoke, Gloria was doing all of these ominous things, preparing for our perilous passage north. Only one little light was on. Gloria tucked in my sheet and the slippery polyester satin comforter.

  "It's a little rougher up here than below, Martha said. We're farther from the water, we swing back and forth more."

  Gloria paused, giving me a chance to respond.

  "Well," she said finally. "Sometimes people take their blankets and pillows down to the main cabin below. Martha said to just lie on the floor there. She said it can help. If it gets really, really bad."

  "Martha's very considerate."

  I struggled out of the polyester mummy, took a double dose of Dramamine, put my head on the flat pillow, pulled the shiny quilt with its orange and purple flower print up to my face, closed my eyes, and fell asleep before Gloria had even come inside from her star watch.

  Two hours later, clinging to my mattress as if it were a life raft and failing still to keep myself in the bunk, I lurched toward the bathroom and landed instead in Gloria's bed, though without waking her from a preposterously peaceful sleep. I remembered Martha's advice from her after-dinner briefing and dragged my quilt and pillow down the wave-drenched steps to the deck below. The wind was loud and urgent and the boat had obviously been replaced by a much smaller one while I slept, a tiny little thing as light as a cork that bobbed wildly and without direction, splashed heartlessly about by the bullying dark seas. I slipped on the steps and landed at the bottom with an excruciating thud on my backbone, yanked open the cabin door in the face of the wind, and threw myself and my damp bedclothes inside.

  I wrapped myself up in the quilt and lay down on the floor of the cabin. Only the dimmest light came in through the portholes. In the night, the nautical creaking of wood and rope, the clanking of chains, the thud of who knows what landing who knows where, mingled with the sound of the engine beating and throbbing just below my head.

  My eyes got used to the dark, and I noticed another lump of blankets beside me. I could not see who was inside. I heard a crash from the corner. That was where a percolator of hot water, heavy white mugs, a jar of instant coffee, and several boxes of tea bags always awaited the weary ecotravelers. A mug rolled past my face. A sailor pushed open the door, stepped over me and the other pile of blankets without a glance, and disappeared into the bowels of the ship. A box of tea bags slid past me. The percolator, quite empty, lodged itself in the small of my back. The door opened again. It was not a sailor. It was a quilt, identical to mine, and a pillow.

  "Is that you?" the blanket said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "No, it isn't," said the blanket in a disgusted voice. It swished past me and went out the door on the other side.

  The door slammed shut and the pile of blankets beside me sat up.

  "Is that you?" it said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "It is not," said the pile, then rose from the floor and followed the first blanket.

  I pictured the ghostly figures flitting about the stormy decks. At that moment, damp and alone, I wished "it" had been me. Oh, good! the other blanket would have said. Come and haunt the boat with us. Come join us in our revelries!

  Another blanket appeared in a few minutes.

  "Is that you?" I said.

  "Certainly not," said Mrs. Cornwall.

  When I woke up, there were six or seven bodies wrapped in quilts huddled around me. Outside, a tropicbird flew alongside the boat, its absurd tail feathers sailing behind it as long and white as a bride's train. But inside, in the weak morning light, no one resembled a lost spirit, or any other sort of spirit. More like steerage class to Tower Island. Mrs. Cornwall had one arm thrown over Mrs. Tommaso, who was snoring loudly. Dot lay curled at their feet like a dog. Jack lay near the door to the galley, Craig not far away. The bundle closest to me was Jeremy. He opened his eyes, then closed them again. I wondered if he knew who had been mysteriously wandering around in their blankets last night. He was, after all, a gossip columnist.

  "Jeremy, I saw people wandering around here last night."

  "And here we all are," he said.

  It was true. Here we all were. A few scattered, sleepy vacationers thrown from their beds by the rough seas of the Pacific. Not a pretty sight, perhaps, but not a mysterious one, either.

  "It seemed different last night," I said.

  The bodies began to stir. To my surprise, one of them was Martha. She sat up looking a little green.

  "And what are you doing here?" Jeremy said, lifting an eyebrow.

  "I'm the chaperone."

  "It was so eerie last night," I told Martha. "People wandering around like ghosts. It was a little scary. And they kept saying, 'Is that you?'"

  "Was it you?" Jeremy said.

  "No."

  "Not you? Well, that must have scared you, Jane," Martha said.

  She smiled and hopped up and was gone before I could think of anything to respond.

  "William, you're snoring," La Cornwall murmured, poking Mrs. Tommaso.

  When I got back to our cabin, the place was chaotic, things strewn all over by the rough passage. Gloria was wearing a remarkably bright tie-dyed shirt and flowing Indian pants adorned with tiny mirrors.

  "I still think there's some hanky-panky going on," I said.

  "Well, then, you'd think someone could have awakened me when we crossed the line."

  8

  THAT EVENING, I read more of The Voyage of the Beagle. Everyone on the boat was reading The Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin is a very generous writer, his style welcoming and firm, like a handshake, though I seemed to have an abridged edition that did not include a much marveled-over passage about a dog being skinned.

  "Maybe I just haven't gotten to it yet," I said.

  "No," Gloria said. "It's not in the Penguin edition. But you have a better introduction."

  She smiled, pleased that she had been able to say something nice. "Imagine all the junk Darwin collected," I said. "Barrels and barrels of it. Bones and leaves and tiny corpses."

  Gloria sat on the edge of her bunk, still smiling, her eyes dreamy and wide, at the thought of so many natural history trinkets.

  Darwin was invited to join the Beagle journey because he was a scientifically inclined gentleman, and Captain Robert
Fitzroy felt he needed the company of a scientifically inclined gentleman on board or he might go mad, as a previous Beagle captain had, as his uncle did, as he himself eventually did, too, scientific gentleman notwithstanding. Fitzroy was commissioned by the Royal Navy to make navigational measurements of little-explored areas. While he drew charts, Darwin filled his nets.

  My great-great-grandfather went to Tierra del Fuego not too long after Darwin did. Well, he wasn't really in Tierra del Fuego, which was not much of a draw in those days, what with the naked man-eating savages and the cold and all. But he did pass by, as cabin boy on a whaling vessel, round the cape, twelve years after Darwin sailed there on the Beagle.

  Darwin and Fitzroy were on a scientific journey. My great-great-grandfather was on a capitalistic journey, a voyage to hunt down as many whales as possible, not to study them, but to render their bodily fats in huge fiery cauldrons. While the tectonic plates slid slowly across the ocean floor changing the world, while Darwin sailed the oceans around South America collecting specimens that would change the world, my ancestor was on the high seas blithely committing crimes against nature.

  That was the father of the triplets, of Franklin, Frederick, and Francis. He prospered and built his three identical sons three identical houses. He started building them when the children were born, and continued tearing them down and redoing them for twenty years. This bond that Martha and I shared, the murderous whaler and his progeny of indistinguishable F. Barlows and their three indistinguishable houses, struck me as particularly profound out here on Darwin's islands.

  "Jane, I think you would be interested in a school of evolutionary thought called cladistics," Gloria told me.

  "Sounds like a female reproductive organ."

  "Cladistics is concerned only with that moment at which one group breaks away from its parent group," Gloria said. "Ancestors are tracked back through history, through prehistory. Cladisticians are not interested in genetics or populations in their environments or adaptation. They look only at ancestral lineage. Like WASPs from Philadelphia."

  "The shabby genteel school of evolutionary thought," I said.

  When we trace my family back, we begin like this: me.

  Then there is my father. His parents came here when they were young children from different parts of Russia that may or may not have been Poland at the time. Their families settled in Brooklyn.

  On the other side is my mother. Her father, Edwin, left the family sugar import business and went to Cuba to work at an agricultural research station. He married his boss's daughter and they had my mother there. The boss's daughter is the oldest of these archaeological artifacts that I encountered in the flesh. She was thin but large-bosomed and carried with her an old-fashioned scent I have never encountered again, an extinct scent. She loved to talk about Cuba, which she had to leave in 1959. She bitterly resented Castro for taking that away from her. "On top of everything," she used to say. And I imagined a pile of things carted off from her house, Cuba tottering on top. She died when I was four. But Cuba remained, in my family, "the Old Country." (And Brooklyn was called "the Neighborhood." Barlow seemed bland and wan compared to these colorful lands.)

  My documentation for this point on the Barlow-Schwartz cladistical diagram, my documentation for the reconstruction of Marianne Barlow of Cuba, is a blurry memory punctuated by sudden clear visions of her skinny neck, by the ring of her voice, by a photograph of her, young and dressed in white, in Cuba, in my grandfather's arms, dancing, and by the considerable oral testimony of my mother.

  When Martha inexplicably stopped being my friend, I thought of my grandmother and that wheelbarrow of loss, Cuba balancing precariously at its summit. Perhaps that was where the feud had begun. I began to think about the feud a lot then, and it came to seem to me not so much a mystery as an omen, my destiny as a descendant of the Barlows. Somewhere, twisted into the thread the Fates had reeled out for me, there was a coded section as inescapable as a strand of DNA, and it said, "You will dial Martha's number and you will leave messages and gradually, after weeks and weeks, you will realize that she never calls you back." And so it was, so it came to pass, that after weeks and weeks the message-bearer grew tired and dialed the telephone less and less frequently, until one day she realized she had not dialed that number for many, many months, and she was overcome with grief. And rage.

  I saw someone die once. I was with Martha. Her family had just joined the Barlow Country Club, and as her mother drove us up the long driveway toward the clubhouse, I could not help but stare in curiosity at the third of the triplet houses, as I did every time I saw it. Inside, it was so different from either of our houses, with its runner of dark red carpeting, as if someone was expecting the queen, and its brass plaques with the names of champion golfers and equestrians, that I almost lost sight of which room would have been which.

  On the wet floor of the dressing room plashed dozens of bare female feet, above them their bare female bodies, which looked, from my vantage point and perhaps because there were so many of them, huge and fleshy and draped, as if we were in a vast Rubens canvas, all piled on top of one another.

  The two of us changed into our matching bikinis, made our way out through the thicket of naked legs and buttocks, and we spread out matching red-and-white-striped towels on the grassy hill above the pool. We talked, about what I can't now remember, and gazed at the rectangular brightness of the blue water. We saw a man swimming underwater. He swam there for a long time, white and fishlike. We saw the lifeguard suddenly jump in. We saw the man pulled out of the water, saw him receive mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, saw the ambulance drive up, saw it take him away.

  Martha and I sat on the hill looking down at death, and while I was curious and shocked and frightened and, so, talkative, Martha was silent.

  Sometimes Martha and I were silent together, in a peaceful, ruminative sort of way, like two cows in a barn, asleep on their feet, our feet. But this silence was not like that. Martha didn't even contradict me when I said that I had kissed my grandmother in her coffin (which I had not). When I laughed, out of nervousness I like to think now, but out of a very real ignorance and insensitivity as well—when I laughed and said the dead man from the pool had done the dead man's float, Martha still did not respond. She didn't join me in laughter, which I hadn't expected, for as soon as I laughed, I knew it was out of place. But she didn't correct me, either.

  "He was probably really old," I said. I looked at her. She leaned back on her arms. Martha stared ahead of her at the bloated pale white body as it was lifted onto a stretcher, at the one arm that hung down, at the white sheet that covered the man, the corpse, and she was silent, which was beginning to annoy me. We were twins. Why was she so far away, incomprehensible? I remember touching my bathing suit, my twin bikini, as if it would help. Her hands were splayed out on the grass on either side of her. I noticed that her fingers were short and stubby and childlike, just like mine. I gaped at Martha's chubby, child fingers. Death, and the possibility that I would cease to exist, scared me and intrigued me. But as I stared at Martha's fat little fingers, an intense, disorienting feeling came over me, and death shrank away, unimportant, forgotten. I gaped at Martha's chubby, child fingers, and for a moment I saw myself the way other people must have seen me, and I was stunned.

  As Martha's mother drove us home, she told me she was sorry we had seen someone die, that death is sad and hard to understand. Martha was leaning out the window, her face flattened by the wind, and didn't seem to notice her mother one way or the other. But I did. Mrs. Barlow patted my bare leg, and her hand felt cool and reassuring, and I wished she were my mother, a soft, gentle presence who thought death was hard to understand. My mother thought death was just fine, in its place, which she reckoned at eighty-two years of age.

  Darwin must have thought about death a great deal, although not in the way Mrs. Barlow did, or even my mother. Once, in South America, Darwin was shown an ancient skull, the fossilized head of some extinct, prehistori
c monster of an animal. The owner's children used it for target practice and had knocked out all its teeth with stones. I often envision evolution as a world of niches waiting for some enterprising species to jump in. But sometimes I imagine all those others, the individuals of a species who happen to be born with mutations that are only second-rate. They are, in Darwin's terminology, unsuccessful. Which is to say, they die, and their DNA dies with them. Like the bloated man in the pool.

  It was an oddly undramatic, distant pageant, that swimmingpool death. But Martha and I never returned to the country club. We switched back to the beach. Martha continued to examine the plants, reading about them, then passing tidbits of information on to me. Queen Anne's lace was really a wild carrot. You could rub jewelweed on a case of poison ivy. The jack of a jack-in-the-pulpit was female. Skunk cabbage smelled so bad in order to attract flies, just the way some flowers smell sweet in order to attract bees.

  Each summer, Martha seemed more and more at home in Barlow. The town, named after her family, began to seem to me to be named after her. During her fourth summer in the Captain Franklin house, when she announced that she and her parents were moving to Barlow year-round, it seemed to me a matter of course. I never for a moment wondered why Martha didn't seem unhappy about leaving the city she had lived in for so many years or whether she would miss her old school or her old friends. I knew that such a misplaced nostalgia was impossible. All those pale city girls? A school with elevators? Of course Martha was thrilled to be starting a new life in the robust town of Barlow.

  The reason that Martha's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Not Our Barlows, as my brothers sometimes called them, were moving year-round to Barlow was that they had decided to turn their rescued house into a bed and breakfast. Their intentions became clear in August when the sign went up. My mother was appalled that the zoning laws would allow an inn, but my father said that the way the town was headed, the zoning laws probably required the house to become a B & B. The sign was beautifully painted in an ornate script on a large white board that hung from a post at the end of the driveway. "The Captain Franklin Barlow House Bed and Breakfast." My mother was furious.