The Evolution of Jane

by Cathleen Schine

  For nearly three years, Martha lived next door, Aunt Anna lived upstairs, and Graziela sewed. "Mmm! Pins for dinner!" my father would say, observing the state of the dining room table. "And thread!" My mother drove me to school each day. Martha's mother drove her to school. My mother also applied to the zoning board to have the Not Our Barlows' Bed and Breakfast closed down. She called the Wildlife Federation and reported destruction of natural habitat. She wrote letters to the local newspaper in which she complained of the strain on the sewage system, though the house had a septic tank. The Barlows, in response, wrote letters to the editor emphasizing their contribution to the local economy. My mother, in response to their response, wrote a letter complaining of the traffic brought in by the bed and breakfast. The bed and breakfast, meanwhile, had not had a single guest.

  Then, on a beautiful spring day at the end of ninth grade, when leaves had just begun to show themselves on their dark, wet branches, when the wind blew in from the sea with a new, fresh scent, when the sun shone down as if in eternal benevolence, our house burned down.

  Martha and I saw the smoke as we walked home from school. We had just smoked some hashish she'd gotten from one of her old friends in New York. The sweet, sticky smell clung to us in that brisk fresh air, and we moved sluggishly down Barlow Street toward a great, black billowing cloud.

  "That's my house," I said.

  I ran the rest of the way and got there in time to see Graziela helping Aunt Anna down the porch steps, one by one, slowly, slowly. The dog stood behind my aunt, nudging her gently but deliberately with his black round nose.

  "That's my house," I said again. I saw Martha running to her own house. I wondered if she was calling the fire department.

  Aunt Anna had a cigarette dangling from her lips.

  "That's in extremely poor taste," I said.

  "Winston tastes good," she said. "Like a cigarette should!"

  I could already hear the sirens as we walked to the edge of the lawn. I tried to think what of value might be burning up in the old white house. I thought of my father's papers in his wonderful old desk. I thought of Graziela's dresses and scraps of dresses. I wondered if the heat would wilt my mother's roses in the garden. I imagined the melted CDs and dripping black vinyl, formerly Grateful Dead albums.

  Martha came and stood with us.

  "I called the fire department, and I called the headmistress so she could tell your mother."

  She looked down at the ground. I realized she was embarrassed, as if she were looking at someone with a deformity.

  "At least it wasn't your house," I said. "With all those collections."

  Martha looked up with a start, and then I knew that she had been thinking the same thing.

  My mother's car roared up the road. She had beaten the fire engines.

  "What happened?" she said. It was the obvious question. But I had not been able to bring myself to ask Graziela and Aunt Anna, for the answer also was obvious. My mother looked at Aunt Anna, the cigarette dangling from her lips, the long ash falling to the ground as lightly as an angel. She looked at Graziela, Aunt Anna's protégé, and at her cigarette dangling from her lips. "Oh God, oh God," my mother said. She shook her head. "Are you okay? Are you all okay?" She didn't expect a response. She turned from us to the house.

  The firemen were there. They were rushing in and out of the door. They were carrying heavy canvas hoses. They rose gracefully into the blue sky on long ladders.

  By the time my father got home, the fire was out. It had started in the living room, probably from an ash smoldering all night in the cushion of Aunt Anna's favorite chair. The fire itself had been put out before it spread through much else of the house, but the smoke and water damage was enormous.

  We stood on the edge of the front lawn and looked at our wet, blackened house as the sky darkened around it. Aunt Anna sat with Graziela in my mother's car listening to the radio. She liked Madonna.

  "This young woman has spunk," she said, nodding her head in rhythm.

  For a moment, I thought of the day, years before, when Martha and I had seen the man in the pool drown.

  "You'll have to stay at our house," Martha said suddenly.

  My mother turned to her in horror. Then I saw it dawn on her that one of the results of having your house burn up was that you had no place to stay. There were no hotels in Barlow. There was one disreputable motel that had hourly rates, which I wasn't even supposed to know existed. And that was about it. Except for the Captain Franklin Barlow House Bed and Breakfast.

  "Do you have any vacancies?" I said, and Martha and I began to laugh uncontrollably. The flophouse that flopped had never had a single customer. Barlow was not a place tourists visited. Mr. and Mrs. Barlow never seemed to mind, though. In fact I think they were relieved. Guests would have disturbed the aesthetic equanimity of their bed and breakfast.

  The hash had by now worn away almost completely, but combined with the situation of the fire, it left me with an eerie, lightheaded sense of unreality. Martha and I could not stop laughing once we started. We laughed and laughed. My mother and father stared at us.

  "Let me see your eyes," my mother said. "They're all red."

  "Mom!" I said indignantly. "It's from the smoke. There's been a fire. Remember?"

  "I called the headmistress," Martha said, somewhat irrelevantly.

  "Yes. Thank you, Martha." My mother smiled and gave a little laugh. "She came to my room, and said, 'Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home! Your house is afire!'"

  "And so it was," my father said.

  "Ladybird, ladybird!" Aunt Anna said in delight.

  We all headed over to the Captain Franklin Barlow House Bed and Breakfast.

  Martha went in ahead while Graziela and I herded Aunt Anna up the porch steps. The dog, my mother, and my father followed. At the threshold to the house, where I had stopped so many times to marvel at the orderly twin of our ramshackle house, where I used to stand in awe and murmur "Chaos," my mother now stood. I heard her say, very softly, under her breath, "Shit."

  "Think of England," my father said.

  The dog lay down on the porch.

  "Think of England," my father said to him.

  Mr. and Mrs. Barlow greeted us formally, as guests, as tourists passing through who had unexpectedly but gratefully come upon this charming inn where they hoped to be able to rest before continuing on their journey through New England in the glorious springtime.

  "Welcome!" Mrs. Barlow said. "Can we get your luggage?"

  "Mom!" Martha said.

  "I'm Robert Barlow," Mr. Barlow said, holding out his hand to Graziela. "Everyone just calls me Barlow."

  "Barlow is right over there," Aunt Anna said, pointing at me. "Don't I know you, young man?" she added.

  "Of course you do," my mother said. "That's Robert. Hamilton's son. Hello, Robert. Thank you for taking us in on such short notice. It's rather an emergency, or we would not have presumed—"

  "Why, you're Robert!" Aunt Anna said.

  "I'm so happy you have chosen to stay with us," Mr. Barlow was saying to my mother. "It's been such a long time. You look wonderful, Vanessa."

  "Who's Robert?" Aunt Anna said.

  "You actually know each other?" I said. "I thought—"

  "I'm Robert, Aunt Anna. Do you remember me? I haven't seen you since I was a little boy."

  "I had a little cousin named Robert, you know," Aunt Anna said. "Nice child."

  "That was me."

  "Was it? Pity about his parents. Shocking, really."

  My father grimaced and took Aunt Anna's arm and led her into what he knew would be the kitchen. "I think you deserve a cup of tea, Aunt Anna. You've had a big, incendiary day, haven't you?"

  I wondered how it was, if there was this longtime family feud, generations of Barlows not speaking to one another, that my mother actually knew her cousin Robert Barlow. And watching my father trying to distract Aunt Anna, I couldn't help but wonder some more. I saw him exchange a glance with my mothe
r.

  "My poor brother," Aunt Anna went on. "Wouldn't change, you know."

  "Who?" I asked. "Grandpa Edwin wouldn't change?"

  "The sheets!" Aunt Anna said.

  "Or a drink," my father said, still trying to steer Aunt Anna toward the kitchen. "Would that be all right, Mrs. Barlow?"

  "Never got over it," Aunt Anna said.

  "Who never got over what?" I said. "What sheets?"

  "Jane," my mother said. "Cállate," which meant, basically, shut up, and was one of the few Spanish words I understood.

  "Vodka," Aunt Anna was heard to say as she was steered into the kitchen. "Two olives."

  We had a family conference in the driveway in front of our smoke-blackened house the next day. The builders had already been there and estimated three to four weeks to clean it up. My mother was furious.

  "How can I force poor Aunt Anna to stay in that awful place?" she said.

  "Under the circumstances, I think the old firebug deserves it," said my father. "Anyway, it's quite comfortable. Charming, really. But it's you I'm worried about."

  "Oh please."

  "The sheets are clean, at least."

  My mother shuddered.

  School ended, summer began, and still we were guests at the Captain Franklin Barlow House Bed and Breakfast.

  Aunt Anna's muddled condemnation of Robert Barlow's parents reminded both Martha and me of the family feud. We had long ago given up our speculation regarding love children and the like. The economic explanation was quite satisfactory, we had decided, now that we were grown up and cynical. But here was this new information. If you could call it information. Aunt Anna had dangled it before us, shimmering scraps of some larger, gaudy tapestry. "Wouldn't change," Aunt Anna had said. Who wouldn't change? Martha's Barlows? And what wouldn't they change? Their wills, obviously. Had Aunt Anna been cut out of the wills of Hamilton Barlow and his wife, the suffragette?

  "And what sheets was she talking about? What do sheets have to do with wills?"

  "Sheets of foolscap?" Martha said. "Or bedsheets, stained wedding-night bedsheets."

  "Unstained wedding-night bedsheets!"

  "Adulterous, incestuous bedsheets!"

  "Hence the love child."

  "The half-wit love child."

  And we pointed accusingly, gleefully, at each other.

  I went over to our house one afternoon to watch my mother garden. I liked it there. The house was sooty and decrepit in places, freshly painted in others, and the garden billowed up around it. My mother had never been a more assiduous gardener than now. It was quite literally the only time she felt at home.

  "What was Aunt Anna talking about? What sheets?"

  "Oh, the sheets."

  "So, like, the sheets of a will? I didn't know you knew Robert Barlow when you were younger."

  "Didn't you?"

  My mother's face was hidden behind branches of pale lilacs and dark leaves. Her shears clicked now and again.

  "The sheets," she said from behind this floral screen. "They really could have changed the sheets. It would not have been all that much trouble. Aunt Anna went to stay with the Barlows, with Uncle Hamilton and his wife."

  "The suffragette."

  "Was she a suffragette? I can imagine her marching. She was a marcher."

  I waited. It was everything I could do not to interrupt, to reach in and steer the story back to its course. But I sensed that I had caught my mother at a good time, lulled by scented purple blossoms.

  "Aunt Anna went to stay with them. With Martha's grandparents. They showed Aunt Anna to her room, which was Robert's room when he was home from college, and they said, 'Oh, Robert only spent two nights here. They're as good as new.' It was all a big mistake, all of it, the whole thing, a hideous mistake, but I was young, and I thought—oh, who knows what I thought, or if I thought at all in those days. Young people are very stupid, aren't they, darling? Poor things. Not you, of course."

  "They didn't change the sheets? And Aunt Anna is still upset? That's so bourgeois."

  "Well, it wasn't a hippie commune, was it?"

  "Dirty laundry," I said. I sneered, too, a very satisfying sneer, with a curled lip. "It's so literal."

  "Yes," my mother said from behind the lilac. "Dirty laundry."

  ***

  Martha and Aunt Anna and Graziela and I spent much of that summer sitting on the lawn behind the house in lawn chairs smoking cigarettes. Aunt Anna was no longer allowed to smoke in the house. She sometimes forgot, and we would smell the tobacco from her bedroom and hurry in to stub out the cigarette before one of the parents found her out. In return, she let us bum Winstons off her. It was an idyllic summer.

  My mother adjusted to the situation by going to her garden early each morning and returning early each evening. That way she was in the house as little as possible, and her roses bloomed fatter and more content than ever on their trellises. She planned new plots, planted new bushes, pruned, weeded, dug, and scraped in a happy delirium of horticulture from morning till night. The garden, bursting gloriously from the earth, looked even more beautiful in contrast to the rickety, patched-up house. In the afternoon, my mother would take a break and have a swim at the beach before returning to her calling. She got an incredible tan.

  She did participate in our innkeepers' breakfast, though. Even Aunt Anna came down for that. On the first morning at the bed and breakfast, there was a short power struggle, as Graziela and my parents tried to help out in the kitchen, and Martha's parents insisted on serving us breakfast as if we were regular customers. I suppose we were. We, on our side of the feud, had insisted on paying the regular nightly rate for our rooms. But that first morning, we all felt a little uncomfortable and tried to help serve and clear up. The Barlows wouldn't hear of it. They were insulted. They were indignant.

  "We are professionals," they said.

  My mother sat in glowering humiliation as Martha's parents brought us fresh-squeezed orange juice.

  I thought it was quite nice to be served breakfast, and to have breakfast with my best friend, Martha, who by virtue of her tender age counted herself among the guests rather than the hosts.

  "Stop smirking," my mother said to me.

  "Will you have our breakfast special?" Mr. Barlow asked. "On Tuesdays it's pancakes and homemade blueberry muffins! Or would you prefer cereal?"

  My mother bit her lip.

  And so the days passed. Aunt Anna obviously felt at home, for she began to pin little notes to all of Martha's parents' furniture.

  "Nivea," a note would read, flapping from the back of an armchair.

  "Left heel on pumps," said another. "Nota bene."

  My mother would slip out of the house after breakfast, and arrive back only to load us into the car to go to the Chinese restaurant or the Italian restaurant for dinner. She was coldly polite to the Barlows, who were coldly polite back.

  My mother grew more and more tan and robust. But Mrs. Barlow, perhaps by contrast, seemed to grow more and more pale. Her face looked drawn. Her smile, so full of energy and direction in the past, had faded into a halfhearted grimace. She didn't get to spend much time outside, what with the laundry and cooking and cleaning for her guests. Her garden suffered. She no longer had time to paint her decorative borders. Now, rather than a locomotive of womanly progress, Mrs. Barlow seemed more like the desperate and weary Little Engine That Could. Up the mountainside she labored, day after day.

  Mr. Barlow, always gaunt and patrician, became more gaunt and patrician.

  "Of course you remember the Boston Wilburs, marvelous people, not the Chicago Wilburs, you know, they died years ago. And their son, well—such fun, the Wilburs. But I don't know if you ever stayed at their place on St. Barts. It was she who gave us this recipe, wasn't it, dear?"

  "Delicious," my mother said, taking a bite of a huge, fragrant muffin. It was clear to everyone that by this time she had reconciled herself to being served by Mr. and Mrs. Barlow, had in fact come to enjoy having her enemies wa
it on her hand and foot. "You must give my compliments to Mrs. Wilbur."

  "Of Boston," Mr. Barlow said, clearing away the plates of bacon and eggs.

  "And of course to Mrs. Barlow," my mother added, bestowing on that person a triumphant smile.

  "Of Barlow," my father said.

  "Thank you," said Mrs. Barlow in a tight voice as she poured my mother's coffee.

  "Well, you know," Mr. Barlow said, "not for long, not for long."

  "What's not for long?" Martha asked.

  "'Of Barlow.'"

  "All good things must come to an end," said Mrs. Barlow. She went back to the kitchen.

  "Yes," said Mr. Barlow. "The Captain Franklin House Bed and Breakfast is closing."

  There was silence. My mother gasped in alarm. Then she must have remembered her campaign to close the inn. "Oh!" she said. "How..."

  "Ironic?" said my father.

  "Horrible!" I said.

  "Daddy, what are you talking about?" Martha said.

  "Your mother and I have decided to move back to the city."

  Aunt Anna took out a cigarette. No one stopped her. We heard the snap of her lighter, a beautiful gold lighter, and the click as it closed.

  "At the end of August," Mr. Barlow said. "Our guests will be back in their house by then, I'm sure."

  My father started to say something, but Mr. Barlow interrupted.

  "We were happy to be available to our guests, even more so as they are relatives, and we'll still come out for summers," he said. "Of course. But this country life is, well—"

  "What? Is what?" Martha said.

  "Well, suburban."

  I tried to take in what I had heard.

  We had driven the Barlows out of Barlow.

  My mother was uncharacteristically quiet, a little smile playing over her lips.

  We have driven the Barlows out of Barlow! she was thinking. My father watched her for a moment, not sure what she would do or say.

  We have driven the Barlows out of Barlow, he was thinking. What will she do or say?

  My mother did and said nothing.

  My father began politely and sincerely thanking his estranged cousins-in-law for their hospitality and skilled innkeeping.