The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  "We are surrounded by commercial establishments," she said. "I suppose we are expected to open an antique store now."

  "Funeral home," my father said. "Beautiful old houses in small towns should be funeral homes. Everyone knows that."

  All that interested me about the bed and breakfast at first was that Martha would be living next door the year round. Martha would go to school with me! But as my parents spoke about it, I began to wonder why, really, anyone would want to rent the rooms of their house out to strangers. When I actually thought about all those interlopers examining or, worse, ignoring the Barlow altars covered with treasures, I was baffled.

  The only explanation I could come up with was that the Not Our Barlows were short of money. I had long known the story of how my father's parents, Grandma and Grandpa Schwartz, had met in a small town in Pennsylvania. My grandfather had inherited money from a stepbrother, a fact I found amazing in itself, because the only people I knew who had stepbrothers had them because their parents had divorced and then remarried. Divorce was common among my friends' parents, and suggested extramarital sex, so it seemed to me thoroughly modern. Remarriage after the death of a first wife never occurred to me, and I thought my grandfather Schwartz very advanced for having a stepbrother, particularly one who died and left him money.

  He took the money and left Brooklyn to seek his fortune. He made his way as far west as my grandmother's little Pennsylvania town. There he struck up a conversation with my grandmother's father, who had come from the Lower East Side and now ran the little town's general store. He also happened to rent out rooms. Naturally, the reason he rented out rooms was that the family needed the money, although my grandfather would later joke that they were really trying to snag husbands for their seven daughters. My grandfather married the oldest, got bored with Pennsylvania in a matter of months, and continued on his journey, east this time instead of west, back to Brooklyn with his wife.

  I had often heard my grandmother Schwartz say how fortunate it was that her family had been poor and so forced to rent out rooms. That was how she met her beloved husband. Every cloud has a silver lining, she would say. Money isn't everything, she would say. Just so you had enough! Then she would kiss my cheek in a horrible nibbling way that was unique to her. No one before or since, thank God, has ever duplicated that kiss.

  I liked the story, though. I liked the idea of my old grandmother, the soft folds of her arms crushed against me as she hugged me, the skin on her face loose and delicate against my own—I liked the idea of her falling in love with the handsome young man coming in from his travels. I imagined him looking at her among the seven sisters and knowing right away, recognizing his bride. Of course, he wouldn't know about the horrible nibbling kisses until much later. I had never met my grandfather Schwartz. He died before I was born. But I had seen pictures of him, and I was a little in love with him myself. I agreed with my grandmother. How lucky to have been poor and forced to rent out rooms and so be swept away by a handsome stranger.

  Thus I thought the Barlows, like my paternal grandmother's family, must have fallen on hard times. And like my grandmother, they didn't seem to mind. One reason they didn't mind was that no one ever came to stay at their bed and breakfast. Except me. There was no handsome stranger who swept into their lives to marry their lovely daughter. There was just the girl from next door. Martha and I were allowed to choose any room we wanted, and we migrated from the one with violets on the wallpaper to the white bedroom with the canopy bed to the one with the fireplace and patchwork-quilt-covered twin beds. My mother, needless to say, was delighted that they had no customers and scornful of my own participation in what she called "the flophouse."

  "The flophouse that flopped," she would say.

  That sounded sweet to me, like the title of a children's picture book. But my mother's continued animosity upset me. It was so unfair, I told her. Martha hadn't done anything. Even her parents hadn't done anything. Not to my parents. Or to me. "This feud is so stupid."

  But all my mother said was, "Don't be silly. That is the nature of a feud."

  Mr. Barlow had retired early in order to start the bed and breakfast with his wife, and I got a chance to know him a little better than during those previous summers when I'd only caught glimpses of him on his way to or from the train station. His wife called him Barlow. When I told my mother, she began to call my father Schwartz and he called her Schwartzita, but that lasted only a few days. Mrs. Barlow always called Mr. Barlow Barlow. He was tall and had an awkward elegance, like a shorebird, his long legs moving with an unlikely grace. His accent, which as a child I thought was English, was really an anachronistic boarding school drawl. He clearly loved the sound of his voice, which was, indeed, a pleasant instrument, and he spoke in his lilting, mannered way with great frequency and generosity. He was a kind man, outgoing and charming even to me. I was quite taken with him. He was so different from my gruff, funny father. And the only suggestion that this man and my mother were cousins was their eyes, an icy blue, which were astonishingly alike. My mother, cool and slim and quiet, who moved with a light quick determination, who never seemed to be at the center of what was happening, but seemed always to be above it—could she really be related to this man who would stand chatting with a twelve-year-old about Northeast Harbor?

  "The Wallaces have a splendid house just up the road from the Abbots, but they won't spend a bean on it! Do you know them? Rich as Croesus, old Campbell Wallace."

  "Why won't he spend a bean, then?"

  "I can't imagine. Lovely town, though. That's where I met my wife. Sailing. You don't sail, do you, my dear? No, I wouldn't think so."

  "Why not?"

  "Well..."

  "I wanted to learn to sail. But my mother—"

  "Yes. Quite. She never did sail, did she?"

  "Did she?"

  "Sailing is marvelous. You must take it up, you know. I haven't been in years."

  Martha and I discussed this disparity between the two Barlow cousins and felt that probably somewhere along the line there had been a mistake, eyes or no eyes, that one of the two was not really a Barlow at all. Perhaps someone had been adopted.

  "Or else he takes after his mother," I said.

  But Martha didn't know if he did or not. Her grandmother had died before she was born.

  When Martha asked Mr. Barlow what his mother had been like, he said, "Mother was a suffragette," and began to cry.

  "Maybe this will end the feud," I said to Martha on our first day of school together, the day we began seventh grade.

  "The feud was about love," Martha said. She spoke with great authority, as she always did. "They always are."

  "Money," I said anyway. "Daddy said it was business."

  Martha shook her head in that pitying way she had. "There's a love child somewhere back there," she said. "I guarantee it."

  I asked my mother if there was a love child in the family and she snorted.

  "Where did you hear that? How very nineteenth-century."

  "Maybe it was in the nineteenth century," my brother Andrew said. "A secret love child. Or maybe it's you, Jane."

  "Stop it, Andrew," my mother said.

  "I'm sorry," Andrew said. He gave me an affectionate pat. "I forgot. Jane is adopted."

  "You're adopted," I said. "You don't look like anyone." Which was not true. He looked just like my mother. And just like me.

  "You're both adopted," my mother said.

  And for a moment I wished I could be adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Barlow. Then I would be Martha's sister. And go sailing.

  Since this was clearly not to be, I consoled myself with the knowledge that at least Martha had moved to Barlow for good, which was how it should be. The town assumed the dimensions of reality itself when I was a child. I was born in Barlow, and I assumed I would live there always. Barlow was so enduring, so loyal, repeating the names of members of my family reverently on street signs. Barlow Highway. Three Captains' Drive. I watched my mother's garden
die each fall and return to life each spring, and that's how Barlow seemed to me. Changes occurred, but they didn't really change anything at all. There was a quarry when I was a child, an abandoned quarry, in which we would swim. We weren't allowed to, but it was fabulously deep, and we could dive off the high sides and keep going down into the dark icy water. The quarry later became a neighborhood of fancy houses, back to back and belly to belly, no sign left of the deep, delicious water hole. This development outraged me when it happened, but then I remembered that the quarry itself had not always been a quarry. Before it was dynamited for gravel, the quarry had been a mountain.

  I often thought about my family's past when I was growing up. The feud was tantalizing, naturally, but all kinds of stories about the Barlows and the Schwartzes had been recited and joked about and contradicted and denied and asserted and told and retold ever since I could remember. "Puss in Boots" and "Cuba" and "Grandpa Schwartz and the Seven Sisters" and "Jacob and Esau" and scraps of unintelligible Spanish were the bones and skulls and fossil teeth of my childhood. Gloria was right—cladistics was just my cup of tea.

  "Yes," Gloria said. "But cladistics is too limited. Now, I have my own theory about you and Martha. You see, organisms change over time, individual organisms, and some of the features that are useful to them when they are young are not of any use when they are older, and some features are only of use when they mature and must begin to court and find a mate. In an analogous way, there are features that were once of value to a species that are no longer useful, and so these features have grown smaller or changed function or even disappeared. You see?"

  She stood up, looming above me, her arms crossed. "That explains Martha, dear. Doesn't it?" she said. "Martha Barlow is a residual organ."

  Martha a residual organ? Martha is a thumb, I wanted to say. Something essential, defining, not residual. When the last of Grandma Schwartz's sisters died, Grandma sat in a chair with a bewildered look and said, "Who do I tell things to?" Whenever we children did something cute, she would smile and then tears would come to her eyes. "Who do I tell?" she would say softly. "I don't have my sister to tell."

  "You don't like my theory, do you?" Gloria said.

  "No."

  "Do you have a better theory?"

  When we would ask my sixth-grade science teacher a question, she would always answer, "Because God made it that way."

  "Because God made it that way," I said. "Martha is not a vestigial organ, and if she is, it's because God made her that way. For our enjoyment. I'm converting from nominalist to natural theologian. You have driven me to it. I want to be a country clergyman. I want to be given a living and grow dahlias. I want to catch butterflies and hold jumble sales. Did they have jumble sales in the nineteenth century? Or is that only in Barbara Pym novels? I think of Martha as a sort of echt friend. You see? The model on which all other friends must be based. And so this entire shipload of strangers has partaken of her essence."

  "Oh dear," Gloria said. "You're not a nominalist. You're not even a natural theologian, really. You're a silly old essentialist!"

  9

  WE WERE A CALM, heterogeneous group, a stagnant pond of little girls, before Martha came splashing in. The urban rhythms of her speech, her nervous city pace, distinguished Martha in our poky school. Not only was she blessed with a profoundly advanced taste in pop music, but Martha also had a boyfriend in New York whom she had kissed. At an age when most people hate to stand out, Martha flaunted her singularity.

  She said, "Girls, I'm here to corrupt you."

  With determination and energy she led strikes and sit-ins protesting our having to wear pastel dresses to dance around the maypole.

  My aunt Anna had moved in with us by this time, when her housekeeper finally died, and she and Martha soon became great admirers of each other.

  "Your little friend shares our family appellation," Aunt Anna said after I brought Martha up to her room to meet her one morning.

  "Well, she's a Barlow," I said.

  "Is she? Perhaps she's related," Aunt Anna said.

  "She's my cousin," I said.

  "Is she? Perhaps she's some sort of cousin, dear," Aunt Anna said, smiling.

  "Your aunt is so great-looking, like a flapper," Martha said later the same day.

  "She thinks you might be related. Because of your name."

  "I want a strand of pearls like that, long."

  "Maybe she'll leave them to you in her will. If she remembers you're related."

  It was amusing having Aunt Anna live with us—she was amusing. The stairs were difficult for her to maneuver by herself, so I was often called into service. I would stand in front of her, one step below, as she leaned on my shoulders. Step by step, slowly, slowly, we would make our way down the stairway.

  "Maybe it would be easier for you if you moved into a room downstairs," I said.

  "Oh, no, Barlow, dear," she said, breathless, her hands clutching at my shoulders for support. "I like my independence."

  Most of the time, Aunt Anna stayed in her room upstairs dressed in an old silk dress and the long string of pearls, a cigarette hanging from her trembling lips. My mother would bring her breakfast up there. Graziela, a young woman from Cuba who was staying with us to help out with Aunt Anna, would bring her lunch. But every evening, at five sharp, Aunt Anna called me to help her downstairs for cocktails. Five o'clock was cocktail hour, even though she would then have to sit down in front of the TV and wait for an hour and a half until my father came home from work and mixed her a martini with two olives. They would clink glasses, say "L'chaim," and relax together in silence for half an hour or so. My father loved Aunt Anna. Finally, there was someone who understood the importance of a stiff drink and a moment of repose after a long day.

  "You're a highly civilized woman, Anna," he would say.

  "Nonsense," she would answer. "I'm not the least bit high. Hollow leg, you know." And a long ash would drop from her cigarette to the floor, landing as lightly as an angel.

  When she discovered Graziela could drive, Aunt Anna began inviting her out for lunch.

  "Come along, Gracie, come along. Hamburgers!"

  Sometimes I would bump into them when I stopped at the diner for a doughnut on my way home from school. Aunt Anna had introduced Graziela to the pleasures of tobacco, and I would see the two of them in a booth, hunched over an ashtray and crumpled red packs of Winstons, their smiling, animated faces in a haze of blue smoke and rapid Spanglish.

  "Now," Aunt Anna said on one of these occasions. "English lesson! I teach you. Should anyone ever give you any trouble about anything..."

  Graziela looked baffled.

  "If, well, let's say, you, Graziela"—she pointed to Graziela—"unhappy." She made a sad face. "Bad man bad to Graziela."

  Graziela stared intently at her teacher.

  "Anyone bad to Graziela, Graziela say: 'Son of a bitch.'" Aunt Anna pronounced it very carefully and slowly. "Son of a bitch."

  "Ssahn ahf ah beech."

  "A regular native, my darling."

  Graziela had been a seamstress in Cuba and was saving her money to open her own shop. She was supposed to clean the house and cook dinner for us, but what with the hamburgers and English lessons and the dresses she was sewing for Aunt Anna, my mother, and me, there was little time left for extras.

  I came home from school early one day—it was a half day because of teachers' conferences—to find Aunt Anna hanging on bravely to the vacuum cleaner as it dragged her old frail person in violent, loud bursts around the living room.

  "What are you doing? You'll kill yourself," I said. I turned the machine off and gently pried Aunt Anna's bent fingers from the handle.

  "Extraordinary machine," she said.

  Graziela came out and said Aunt Anna wanted "to go hamburger" in a new dress that still needed to be hemmed, and when Graziela had protested that she really did have to vacuum, it was after all her job, Aunt Anna had offered to do it while Graziela finished sewing the desi
red outfit.

  "Graziela! Hamburgers!" Aunt Anna said suddenly, jumping up, teetering for a moment until Graziela ran forward to steady her.

  "Now she is forgotten," Graziela said.

  "Now she has forgotten," I said.

  "Nonsense," said Aunt Anna. "Graziela remembers everything, don't you, dear? Extraordinary," she added as they passed the vacuum cleaner and swayed unsteadily out the door.

  My mother had great faith in Graziela and often bemoaned the fact that we did not have enough money to get her started in her own business. But Graziela did what she could from her room, which housed an astonishingly diverse expanse of pins, rolls of material, paper patterns, and scraps that piled up like colorful leaves. One of her most devoted customers was Martha. Martha had changed from the days of ruffles and bows that so enraged and fascinated me, and Graziela kept both of us in an abundant supply of clothes. When we tired of preppy blouses and skirts and turned to layers of thrift-shop silk and lingerie, Graziela magically transformed these items into clothing that fit. I loved this constant manufacturing in the room downstairs, though I was studying the Progressive era in school and worried that we might be running a sweatshop.

  "Now that's a good idea!" said my father, who was getting a little tired of making us cube steaks every night for dinner because Graziela was too busy sewing and we too busy being fitted. "Clever girl." He patted my head.

  Just in case, I suggested to Graziela that she might consider unionizing herself. But the mention of unions reminded her of Castro, and she said, "Son of a bitch," very loudly, slowly, and with a perfect accent. She returned indignantly to her sewing machine.

  Her English teacher put down her martini and applauded loudly.

  "By George, she's got it," my father said, and went to the kitchen to make us dinner.