The Evolution of Jane Read online

  She was also the girl who had grown up next door to me, my best friend, the one who didn't die, the one for whom I received absolutely no sympathy.

  Martha Barlow, my cousin and childhood friend, still my cousin, no longer a child, no longer a friend, standing in the little airport of Isla Baltra, Galapagos, Ecuador, waiting for the group from Natural History Now.

  She stared at me.

  "You look just like someone I used to know," she said.

  "Who?"

  "Jane? Is that really you?"

  Martha smiled, a pure, involuntary smile that welled up from years and years of friendship. I smiled back. For one moment the simple surprise and fact of recognition hit both of us directly. Then I thought, This is not what I had in mind.

  An anonymous vacation with knowledgeable, mildly entertaining, and occasionally enraging strangers was what I'd had in mind. But here was this person who knew me, whom I had once known. Her presence was suddenly not only surprising, but ominous.

  "I didn't know you were here," I said.

  "I've been down here for a year. I work here. Well, I live here, too. It's so amazing to see you. So weird. Are you actually on this tour? You're in my group! The past rises up and walks upon the earth!"

  The friend is dead! Long live the friend!

  Martha gave my hand a squeeze. I must admit I was filled with what I can only call joy. Martha, my best friend, among all the strangers and the ashes. But the joy lasted a mere moment. For she was not my best friend, I reminded myself. She had thrown me over, dumped, ditched, cut, cold-shouldered, discarded, shelved, jettisoned, and retired me. I considered asking her right then and there why she'd been so awful so many years ago, so awful that I was reduced to mentally sputtering mixed metaphors. Or not precisely awful, as she had never done anything overtly unkind. She had just stopped being my friend. Stopped, like a clock.

  But of course I didn't say, "Hey, you over there, the disloyal, fickle one holding the sign, what the fuck happened anyway?" as I wanted to. For one thing, I didn't have a chance. Martha, the group leader, the guide, was quickly surrounded by her charges. There was a young, heavily equipped couple who introduced themselves as Craig and Cindy Gerrard. Then two women—surely they were at least seventy-five years old—greeted her. One was tall and imposing with a brisk and Tyrolean manner, though she spoke in a thick Queens accent. The other woman sported an alarming amount of aged but still coquettish cleavage. I wondered if Martha worried that these elderly ladies would not be up to the trip. I decided that they both, each in her own way, exhibited quite sufficient vigor. Another aged traveler approached Martha, also a septuagenarian, well groomed, well preserved, small and dapper. He kissed her hand and said, "And a little child shall lead them!"

  Martha greeted the rest—the family I'd seen on the plane, a middle-aged couple, and a woman wearing a United Nations of ethnic garments and carrying an umbrella—and turned back to me now and then to say, "What a coincidence! I can't believe it!" I had no idea how Martha had come to be a ranger for the Ecuadorian Parks Department. The last I heard was that she was premed in college.

  I said, "I thought you were going to medical school."

  "I'm a botanist, actually."

  "So I guess you never went to medical school."

  "Me? No. Did you?"

  "Me? No. You were supposed to go."

  "Well, I didn't."

  "Well, I certainly didn't," I said.

  We smiled at each other, both recognizing the comforting, irritable rhythm of a friendship set in its ways. But this intimacy, too, lasted only a moment.

  Martha said, "Well!" and resumed her role as guide.

  I had successively mourned, demonized, and forgotten Martha, off and on, for quite a few years. Standing in that airport, awkward and uncertain and impatient, I found it hard to believe that now, after so long, Martha could casually greet me, turn easily to the others, nonchalantly turn back again. I don't know what I thought would have been more appropriate. A massive stroke, perhaps.

  "We're like your little ducklings," I said. The sound of my voice depressed me. It was forced, lighthearted, one of those voices that have about them a faint echo of desperation.

  "Quack," said the oddly dressed woman, and she shook my hand warmly, another member of the flock.

  This is where I ought to tell you why Martha and I stopped being friends. The problem is, I don't know. There just came a time when she stopped calling, stopped returning my calls, stopped dead. I never knew what it was I'd done. I just knew that I'd lost my best friend. Or perhaps misplaced her, for here she was again, right in front of me.

  We climbed into a launch. The wind blew in our faces. The sea was everywhere. It filled every sense. I tried to think of something to say. Ahead, I could see the Huxley, a ninety-foot yacht built especially for ferrying tourists around the Galapagos.

  "Our boat is the same size as the Beagle," I said.

  Martha nodded.

  "The Beagle carried seventy-four passengers for five years. Can you imagine all those people, all those years on such a small boat?"

  "Well," Martha said. "Actually, I forgot to tell you. The trip has been extended! The other sixty people are already on board!"

  Our latitude was zero degrees. Martha and I sat in a launch motoring toward a ninety-foot boat at zero degrees. Was that like starting out from zero? Perhaps we could begin all over again, squabbling happily, pretending the last few years had never occurred, ignoring the years of friendship before that. We could meet as if for the first time and proceed from there, from zero degrees latitude. But I saw immediately that Martha was far too familiar to meet for the first time.

  The sun was so bright it bleached the sky a pale, pale blue. I put on my sunglasses and watched Martha from behind them. She loved the group already, that was clear. I was sure that she liked all her groups, indulging them, her ducklings waddling all in a row behind her. Martha was not maternal, don't get me wrong. When she played with dolls as a little girl, they were never her babies—they were her devoted followers. I was sure that the tourists in every one of her groups were as devoted as her dolls. I always had been, and old habits die hard: Martha pushed her sunglasses up on her head, and I felt an awkward urge to do the same.

  We climbed a ladder from the panga, as Martha called the launch, to our boat. We were handed up by members of the crew. All of them then assembled in the main cabin, a lounge with a bar. There were ten crew members wearing dress-white uniforms, and as they shook hands and greeted us in smiling, animated Spanish, I thought that, unfriendly as the islands might be, the Huxley, at least, was going to be an amiable place. The cook, fat and bow-legged, wore a stiff, sparkling white chef jacket and a tall sparkling white chef hat that towered officially and absurdly above his white shorts and sneakers.

  We had been ferried to the boat in two pangas, and I had gone with the courtly old gentleman and the two older women, the one tall and mighty, the other soft, ripe, and risqué, whose names I instantly forgot, as well as the young couple, who both had the softest traces of Canadian accents, and the person of late middle age in deeply eccentric clothing who had quacked. In the other panga, there was the middle-aged couple and the guy who had advised me about seating in the plane along with his family. Although I was rather skeptical about men just at that point, I did note that he seemed to be single and was good-looking, though short. And I idly speculated what it would be like to have him as my roommate on the trip. But I knew the eco-bag-lady was somehow meant for my cabin. There was an unaccountable, hideous inevitability to it.

  I also thought of the possibility of sharing a cabin with Martha, of course: perhaps forcing the issue of whether we were or were not still friends by cramped, elbow-jostling intimacy, perhaps to punish her for her disloyalty with constant cold companionship, or perhaps just to have an extended sleepover as in the halcyon days of youth. I wasn't too clear on my motives. But I did realize that Martha probably got to have her own room, like the teacher on a class
trip to Washington, D.C. For my hubris in hoping to share a cabin with her, I would be rewarded with the weirdo in the kimono and Ashanti headdress.

  I listened almost impassively as Pablo, a very young Ecuadorian with curly black hair and the only crew member who spoke English, gave us our room assignments, and my roommate fears were confirmed.

  She waved at me.

  I waved back.

  Around us rose a confused competitive murmur. Our room was one of only two on an upper deck. Other passengers looked suspiciously at me and the roommate. A silent question rippled through the group: Would our room be better than theirs? Or worse?

  It was better. It had windows and a door that opened out onto the deck. The cabins below were prettier, bigger berths, with walls of varnished wood. But they smelled of fuel, and their little portholes were useless. You couldn't open them for air because they were nailed shut, and they were far too cloudy to let in the sunlight. In my cabin, though my knees bumped my roommate's if we both sat on the bunks at the same time, the fresh chill of the air blew through, from door to bright, open window. I was grateful for that breeze, for although we had not yet begun to move, the slight swaying of the boat was already making me a little seasick.

  "Just like Charles Darwin himself," said my new roommate, with a reassuring pat on the back.

  Our cabin was not much bigger than a train compartment. Pablo ducked his curly head in the open door to tell us we must each take only one shower a day, or two short showers. Martha had the other cabin on the upper deck. I saw her walk by as Pablo added that we should not flush toilet paper down the toilet, but deposit it in the wastebasket, which he would empty frequently. He spoke in a beautiful, lilting English, which I barely listened to, so intent was I on Martha, incongruous, unexpected, out of place, a fossil, my seashell in the Andes.

  My roommate introduced herself as "Gloria Steinham, no relation." I guessed she was about my mother's age, and I suspected that even in that cramped space, her knees would seldom have a chance to bump mine, so infrequently did she sit still long enough to get in the way. She told me she was a science teacher, which perhaps I should have guessed, as she seemed to be wearing around her neck all the specimens she would need for an entire unit on shells, seedpods, or canine teeth. Then she announced that she was never seasick, and that she did not snore.

  "Which is a blessing," she said.

  "My mother's a teacher, too."

  "She should have come with you!"

  I tried to picture my mother on the Huxley.

  "Well, if she could be captain, maybe," I said.

  2

  EACH MORNING, my mother could be heard saying the same thing: "Chaos." She would murmur it in her soft voice as she mulched her garden or buttoned her coat or stared out the window at a cloudless sky. "Chaos." For years I thought "chaos" was an exclamation of some sort, an expression of abstracted joy, not unlike "wow," for my mother smiled as she said it and shook her head, as if in wonder.

  When I think back, her mild observations of chaos were not so much complaints as welcomes, greetings, like a sailor breathing in the salt air. Even her hair looked windblown in anticipation. I used to imagine my mother as a sea captain, like her sea-captain grandfather, Frederick Barlow.

  My middle name, as I've said, is Barlow. Jane Barlow Schwartz. My mother did try to use Barlow as my first name, but my father, in this matter at least, prevailed, and I reverted, at age two weeks, to Jane. Of the many ways in which it was unfortunate that my great-aunt Anna, herself a Barlow, chose just that moment to enter senility, the one that affected me exclusively was her conviction, until her death, that my name was Barlow Schwartz, which she repeatedly criticized as silly, undignified, and, worse, unladylike.

  "Well," my mother would say to a distressed Aunt Anna, "her name is Jane, but if you insist on calling her Barlow, we could always change it."

  "Barlow? Barlow, indeed!" Aunt Anna would say. "Why, you must call me Aunt Anna, of course!"

  Sometimes Aunt Anna would introduce herself by saying, "How do you do? I am the skeleton in the family closet." We're the sort of family that has skeletons rather than ghosts, and I'm grateful for that. Ghosts are personal and intrusive, memories that haunt the living. We have neither the imagination nor the patience for ghosts in my family.

  Skeletons, on the other hand, are the real thing. Skeletons hold everything together. Skeletons hold the past. They hold information. That's why Darwin collected skeletons. On one of his many inland excursions from the Beagle, Darwin visited a place in Patagonia called Port Desire. One of his traveling companions shot an emu, which is some kind of big flightless bird like an ostrich. It was smaller than the other emus he'd seen, so Darwin thought it was an immature member of that species, a young rhea. Only after the little ostrich was cooked and eaten did he realize it was probably a specimen of a smaller, less common species, which he had heard about but had never seen, though he had been searching for one for months. He scraped the bones from the plates, gathered up the remaining bits of feathers and skin and, voilà! Ostrich stew transformed into Rhea darwinii, a new species stuffed and on exhibit at the Zoological Society.

  Skeletons don't come and go like ghosts, even after they've been served for dinner. You can study them, measure them, read the past in them. They're as faithful as dogs. I have tried to examine my friendship with Martha, my former best friend, in this manner. If only I could scrape her off my plate and pick at the bones of our friendship and glue back the feathers.

  There's one old shard that I'm particularly attached to—an event that occurred when Martha went on a trip with her parents. She asked me to water the plants she was growing for a science project. I remember the plush emptiness of her house as something thrilling, secret. I walked up the stairs to Martha's room and stood on the threshold looking in with an almost guilty excitement. It was just Martha's room, a canopy bed, a prism hanging by the window, a poster of Madonna. I watered the plants. Then I left Martha a note saying I had been there. I drew a heart and signed it. I felt suddenly self-conscious about the heart. I put a question mark beside it. And I left.

  Martha asked me about it when she got home.

  "It looks sort of mean," she said. "A heart with a question mark."

  "It wasn't meant to be mean," I said.

  "Oh. Okay." And that was it. Martha crumpled the note, threw it away, and it was only later, when we stopped being friends, that I thought of the question mark and the heart again. Why did I draw a heart? Because I loved Martha? Why did I write a question mark? Because I was embarrassed about having such strong feelings for Martha? Why did Martha even mention such a stupid, unimportant note? Because it really said so much? Were Martha's feelings hurt? Why would her feelings be hurt by an offhand note? Did my explanation soothe her feelings? Did she, years later, think of that note? Did she think, "Jane is peculiar, both excessive and stingy in her affection. Who needs a friend like that?" Is there anything more petty, more exalted, than a friendship between two girls? How did mine go wrong?

  Martha took up almost as much of my energy when we stopped being friends as she did before we stopped being friends. I want you to understand that there were long stretches of my life during which I did not think about Martha Barlow. There were many such stretches, days and weeks and months. I fought with my parents, fell in love with boys, studied for exams, and went to Europe. I graduated from college, got an apartment, got a job, got married, got divorced. My life was full of joy and annoyances, just like the next person's. I didn't sift through Martha's trash in the middle of the night. I was not insane. I was just haunted.

  I was haunted by her absence. Did I say, just a moment ago, that my family did not have ghosts? That we had skeletons instead? Skeletons in our closets? Well, I was haunted by Martha, and if that makes her a ghost, so be it. I stand corrected.

  Martha first appeared in Barlow when she was eight and I was seven and a half. She and her parents were going to spend the summer in the house to the west of ours.
There was another house to the east. Ever since I can remember, and before that, too, those neighboring houses were a source of mortification for my mother. All three houses were identical, three white houses balanced on the cliffs above the sea. They had been built by my great-great-grandfather for his three children, triplets named Frederick (my great-grandfather), Franklin (Martha's great-grandfather), and Francis (he never married, seeming to prefer sailors to women). The three brothers were ships' captains who prospered and caused their New England village to prosper to such an extent that the town fathers rechristened it "Barlow" after its own favorite sons.

  By the time my parents got married and moved into the house with my grandmother, the Captain Francis Barlow house to the west had become a clubhouse bordered by a golf course and tennis courts. A gray wooden staircase scaled the cliff from beach to house, and club members in bathing suits traipsed up and down from June till September. We were far enough away not to be disturbed by noise, and gradually my mother came to accept the Barlow Country Club, almost as if she herself had established it, like a Rockefeller letting the commoners walk his Pocantico pastures. But the Captain Franklin Barlow house was a different story.

  Just half a mile down the road, beyond the meadow and the stand of trees that bordered our property and signaled the beginning of theirs, stood a house that mirrored ours in every way, and yet no one would have had the slightest difficulty distinguishing between them. For the shutters, which sagged and gapped and faded into their dotage at our house, hung straight and bright on theirs. At our house we believed in crabgrass the way others believe in the stars—crabgrass was less than a religion, but it held meaning. And that meaning was: Look how green and lush a weed can be, look at the pretty yellow dandelions. And all without watering! The lawn spread out from their house in manicured opulence. This house was Martha's. Visiting Martha, I would walk through the field and beneath the trees until I reached that carpet of grass. Then I would ascend the stairs to the large porch, continue across the polished floor, through the open door, where I would stand for a moment, alone and awed by the wallpapers, by the splendor and order and spotless peace, and I would sigh happily, and I would say, "Chaos."