The Evolution of Jane Page 6

  "Don't you think that transmutation is a better word than evolution?" I said. "For the mystery of one thing being transformed into another? Evolution sounds so wonderful."

  "But evolution is wonderful," Martha said, looking up from the notes she was reading.

  "Well, but change is not progress. Necessarily. Change basically stinks. Most of the time."

  "Jane's just trying to provoke us," Martha said.

  "No, I'm not," I said. I'm trying to provoke you, Martha. But Martha just continued to look at me with a benign and amused smile.

  Before coming on the trip, I read somewhere that you cannot tell when speciation is occurring. There is something called a splitting event, but you cannot see the split until after it's happened. You can only look back. You cannot predict the future or even interpret the present. It's not yet clear which slight variation will prove useful, which organism will be favored by natural selection, will prevail over a change in climate or the introduction of some new group into the territory, or the extinction of an old one. Perhaps I had just witnessed a splitting event without realizing it. Martha eating dinner. Perhaps I had seen the seminal episode, a splitting event of tremendous significance: the moment that Martha, now thin, began to get really fat. Years from now, seeing an obese Martha, I would look back and think, That was when it started.

  I wondered if imagining someone getting immensely fat was a sign of hostility or just envy, because with the rocking of the boat, I could manage to eat only a little rice myself. I decided it didn't matter because I was entitled to both envy and hostility, considering how unpleasant even slight seasickness was and what a bad friend Martha had been.

  "I was divorced once," Gloria said.

  "Doesn't that mean you're still divorced?"

  "For better or for worse."

  Gloria and Martha began talking about lenses and filters, which bored me. It was clear that Martha was not ready to have a heart-to-heart talk, which would not have bored me, so, in the interest of science and camaraderie, I decided to entertain myself with the Tommasos. Mr. Tommaso was a saturnine man, a retired high school history teacher, who was forced to come along with his wife to carry her luggage, though he soon would prove to be the most gung ho of any of us, wanting to crawl into every lava tube, dive into every icy pool, tramp across every field of guano. Mrs. Tommaso was a volunteer at the Humane Society and was therefore quite understandably disappointed in the human race. She was in favor of Nature, though: she seemed to view it, and the Galapagos by extension, as an abandoned litter of kittens.

  "Poor little islands. No water for six months."

  "I read that two years can go by without rain," Jack Cornwall said from the neighboring table.

  Mrs. Tommaso shook her head and clucked. "Such a shame, such a shame, such a shame," she murmured.

  I looked from Mrs. Tommaso to Gloria to Mr. Tommaso to Jack and his family, and I felt myself suddenly, rapturously charmed. My heart expanded at what I saw before me: not a cabin full of strangers, but rather, there, in those padded booths, a floating world of curiosities to be collected and labeled in a neat and orderly hand. Darwin could not have been more eager upon first setting out in the Beagle, or more content upon packing his first fossils to be sent home. Had I really ever cried for a lost husband? Stuff and nonsense! This group of men and women in many-pocketed shorts seemed so much more appealing than any marriage could be. Had I mourned a lost friendship? What rubbish. Here was a whole world, unnamed, uncategorized. Its creatures stood in a genial line to spoon out their pork chops and rice and squash from the buffet.

  There are certain signals upon which one can usually rely when distinguishing those individuals who might become one's friend. "I like your glasses," someone might say. Or you might be wearing identical shoes. A phrase of unexpected sensitivity or wit is casually thrown into a conversation. Or a haircut will catch your eye. A nice New York accent on a trip to the Midwest. Or someone on the bus reading Sybille Bedford. There is a moment of recognition, of hope. Then the courtship dance begins, the chat, the questions, the families and hobbies and prejudices and phobias offered up for scrutiny. The signals on the Huxley were a little muddled—we were all so out of context, all dressed the same, all reading the same book. And though my first impressions have proved wrong time and time again, it was unsettling not to have any. Everyone blended together at first, a pleasant blur of companionship, a group of people whose names I sometimes remembered, toward whom I felt a mild, reassuring condescension.

  I turned around in the booth to face the table of Cornwalls. Mrs. Cornwall was referred to privately by Gloria as La Cornwall or the Widow Cornwall, for she and her entourage of descendants were visiting the Galapagos in honor of the deceased patriarch, Mr. William Cornwall, who had been stationed at the temporary U.S. Army base on Baltra during World War II and had always planned a trip back to the islands but had never found the time. Jack, Liza, Brian, and Dot all attended the old woman. It is probable that Brian and Dot and perhaps even Liza had a last name other than Cornwall, but if so it was never spoken aloud on board the Huxley, at least not in my hearing. They were Cornwalls, one and all. Even Mr. William Cornwall, deceased, had joined the party, the Widow confided.

  "We thought we might have trouble in customs," said Brian.

  And maybe there would be a'séance later.

  "Luckily no one noticed," said Liza.

  "Like anyone would," Dot said with a contemptuous curl of her lip aimed at her mother.

  "A spiritual journey," I said politely.

  "You could call it that," Jack said.

  The spirit of Mr. Cornwall had apparently decided not to join us for dinner, though, for Mrs. Cornwall then said, "What a shame William missed this dinner. He always so enjoyed his meals."

  The Cornwalls could be classified as a tribe, I decided. A fairly primitive one. Then there was Jeremy, who would in the old days have been called a lifelong bachelor. But the rest of us came in pairs, like Noah's animals. Roommates Jane and Gloria, two by two. Continuing my shipboard classification, I studied the pair across the room: Ethel, the tall, pink-cheeked, septuagenarian sports enthusiast who knew which way was north and, when asked what she did, said only, "I am a cat lady"; and her roommate, Jeannie, in tight pants, who worked in a doctor's office.

  "I've brought an awful lot of medicine, if anyone needs anything," she said. "Compazine, amoxicillin, codeine..."

  It turned out that everyone had brought large supplies of medicines and offered to share them with everyone else in a group spirit that seemed to me to hover between that of hardy naturalists and slightly competitive mothers-in-law. Jeannie won the competition.

  "I have a tooth-repair kit," she said gently.

  There was a hush of admiration before we all resumed eating.

  Ethel and Jeannie shared a table with Craig and Cindy. This ambitious-looking couple were both lawyers, and they lent an air of youthful success to our group. Craig was about thirty and spoke in a soft but authoritative voice—a voice that had never polluted or even littered, a voice that recycled. Cindy was probably a few years younger, about my age, expensively dressed in the latest gear, and she possessed that smooth, professional air that women who wear hair bands sometimes exhibit. By day, like a comic book superhero, she worked as a steely corporate lawyer. By night, she raised hermit crabs.

  "What do they taste like?"

  "As pets," she said.

  I said her name silently, as I did everyone's in an attempt to keep them all straight. Cindy. Then I thought of Noah's wife. When I was very little, three years old maybe, and screaming angrily from the bathtub, my grandmother came in to appease me, as grandmothers do. She sat on the toilet with the lid down and told me the story of Noah's ark. She mentioned Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and Noah's wife.

  "What was Noah's wife's name?" I asked my grandmother.

  "Cindy," she said.

  In fact, Noah's wife has no name, does she? But my grandmother didn't miss a be
at: "Cindy." For years I thought Noah's wife's name was Cindy.

  I told our Cindy this story. It seemed particularly appropriate on a boat traveling through the very islands that helped Darwin set the flood story on its ear. People ought to have suspected something was off about that ark business right from the get-go, right at the part where it introduced Noah's wife and didn't mention that her name was Cindy.

  "Cindy?" Cindy said. "Not even Cynthia?"

  "Jane and I come from a very informal family," Martha said.

  It was her first mention that we were not just old friends but relatives, too. Cindy pricked up her ears immediately. Others, too, seemed to have heard and were leaning our way.

  "You're related?" asked Jeannie from across the room.

  "Distant cousins," Martha said.

  The Cornwalls, as the official family on board, looked displeased.

  "Wow," said Ethel, which seemed to be the general consensus.

  Wow, indeed.

  On deck that night, I looked at the sky and tried to remember everything I had seen on our first field trip. The air was cool and I had to wear a sweatshirt. I saw the Southern Cross. The Big Dipper was in the wrong place.

  I had already climbed into my bunk and turned out my light when Gloria returned to the cabin. I lay in the roar of the engine and the roll of the sea and watched as she stood in the doorway looking at Jupiter's moon through her binoculars. She was carrying a PBS tote bag with an umbrella poking out of it.

  Yes, it was good that my husband left me so that my mother could send me on this trip, I thought. There is flora here, and there is fauna. There is Gloria. Martha is here, and she will come around. She will show herself to me eventually—she will rise like the Southern Cross, revolve into sight like Jupiter's moon. This is paradise, this boat and its creatures, all of us engaged in the clear and simple routine of following the leader.

  "But why are you carrying an umbrella, Gloria?" I said to the large silhouette in the doorway.

  She smiled, patted the long, rolled umbrella affectionately.

  "Just in case," she said.

  5

  THE FEUD BETWEEN Martha's family and my own was a mystery to me as a child, but in that respect it did not differ from most of my experiences in those days. So much of that time has a hazy quality to it. I don't think that's simply a trick of memory, or a failure, like a failure of eyesight, a mnemonic myopia that blurred what was really perfectly clear. I think the blur is accurate.

  My brothers towered above me, exchanging glances and smiles I could not interpret. My mother and father lived in an Olympus of subtleties and nuance. I watched them and I wondered. I wondered about a lot of things.

  "If you were a tiny man, as big as a thumb," I said to my father, "and you stood inside my mouth, and I closed my mouth, would you suffocate and die?"

  My father stared at me.

  "Jane," he said, "I'm speechless."

  "'I'm speechless' is speech," I said, somewhat mollified by this linguistic triumph.

  I resented that state of childhood wonder. It was insatiable, yet it seemed to me to be no more than a puerile affliction, like baby teeth. My ignorance struck me as a bizarre anomaly, for I felt, with utter certainty, that I was—how can I say this?—that I was sufficient. Evidence to the contrary forced itself on me every hour of every day, but that seemed to me some preposterous misunderstanding.

  The family feud settled in with the other mysteries of the world. In fact, somewhat more comfortably, for I liked having a family feud in the family, liked the sound of it, the idea of it, possibly because it never occurred to me that I should avoid the part of the family with which we were feuding. I spent every day of that first August with Martha. We did pretty much what I had always done by myself or with my dog. We sat by the stream that ran across both our properties and put our feet in the water. We walked into the swamp and picked mushrooms, planning to save them to poison someone someday, should that be necessary. And we went to the beach. It was a rocky beach, and we had to scramble down a steep dirt path to get to it, but at low tide there was a great flurry of activity there. Crabs sidled around and gulls dropped clamshells on the rocks and terns dove for the bluefish that churned up the water.

  Because of Martha's advanced age and her genuine urban sophistication, I was immediately in her thrall. She moved very quickly, without hesitation, and I would sometimes watch her, as I watched many things, in a distracted, openmouthed stare that prompted her to give me a poke, as if to wake me, though I was in fact fully, acutely awake, just stunned by her energy, by the way she tore through a day. I followed her, argued with her, resented her. I suppose it was my own admiration that I resented. I was not in the habit of admiring others, only of tolerating them.

  Martha forgave me my resentment. Forgiving suited her. It was her hobby. Perhaps that's why she liked to argue so much. Faults must be identified in order to be forgiven. She prided herself on this generosity. I think, too, that in Martha's eyes, her magnanimity could only be enhanced by her critical nature, for there were always a great many failings and weaknesses requiring forgiveness which came to her attention. There were so many to choose from: even as a child, she had to become something of a connoisseur.

  Everyone around us could be counted on for a readily available and rather decent house wine of flaws, but Martha was democratic enough never to slight the daily, repetitive, and ordinary circumstances that required forbearance. And when someone did offer a glorious burst of the unexpected, the exotic, she pardoned that as well. She loved us, and she suffered us gladly.

  In the same way that Martha forgave others and continued to love them, she was apparently able to forgive her own weakness and to continue to love herself. It was a trait I envied and tried unsuccessfully, as I did with many of Martha's traits, to emulate. Her understanding of her own essential decency accompanied her so amiably through her life, strong and protective. She seemed as safe as a nun.

  We spent week after week walking, sitting, running, and throwing things in all the places in which I'd walked, sat, run, and thrown my whole life. At first, Martha knew nothing about the plants we trampled or the insects we caught. My cosmopolitan cousin listened as I told her that the tadpoles would grow legs and that we might find a mouse's skull in an owl pellet, the full extent of my knowledge of nature, acquired during my naturalist period. She listened not out of interest, though she was sometimes interested; and she interrupted not out of boredom, though she was often bored. I knew that both listening and refusing to listen were gestures, that they were aimed specifically at me, and so I welcomed both equally. They meant that I existed, existed for her, which was the only reason I told her anything to begin with.

  We were both bossy, but Martha was bossy in an abundant, inclusive way, while I tended to be merely imperious. Seeing past my magisterial pronouncements and recognizing the limitations of my own nature lore, she quickly filled the gap, taking books out of the library, carrying a guide to plants in her pocket, soon recognizing birds by song and feather, trees by bark and leaves and evening silhouette.

  I was stunned by this city energy turned toward my sleepy woods. She had the excessive enthusiasm of an arriviste, and though I corrected her whenever I could, I frequently was reduced to grammatical quibbles, as I was so obviously outclassed in the area of flora and fauna. But when we fought over rules and the meaning of words, like two tiny pedants, our tiffs took on the form of ardent cordiality more than anything else. Until Martha, no one had bothered to argue with me. My parents had smiled indulgently at my intellectual limitations, as if I were a fool or an immigrant who hadn't learned the language yet, or a child. My brothers had veered sharply between telling me to shut up and patting my head. My friends at school cried when I argued with them. But for Martha and me, no subject was safe, no statement, no observation. Was it more dangerous to cross the street at dusk wearing gray or wearing black? We debated for weeks, marshaling our tautological arguments with increasing passion and certainty. I
t didn't matter that neither of us owned a black garment, or a gray one. It didn't matter that we weren't allowed to cross streets alone anyway. It didn't matter that at dusk Martha had to go inside for her dinner and her bath. It didn't even matter who won. It was during that August, in the midst of our playing and bickering, that I first understood what loneliness was, and understood that I had been lonely, a little lonely, until my cousin and friend Martha Barlow showed up in the country on her imaginary horse to rescue the house next door.

  In the beginning, in Barlow, I would meet Martha in the sort of no-man's-land between our two properties. My mother had not forbidden me to see Martha, but I was afraid she might, and I kept a low profile. I did not go to Martha's house, imagining her parents to be as fiercely alienated from the other side of the family as my mother was, and also feeling it would be a betrayal of our side. I asked Martha what she knew about the feud, and she said there was no feud, it was all my side of the family's fault, her father had told her so.

  We met at the stone wall shaded by the crooked weeping willow tree. The shadows surrounded us, deep and protective. I realize now that my mother must have known where I was all this time. Or at least whom I was with. But she never let on. Perhaps she thought Martha and I would tire of each other. Perhaps she couldn't think of anything, really, to say about it. It would not have been like my mother to forbid me to play with a perfectly nice little girl next door, even if her ancestors were treacherous criminals. It was more like her to let me imagine that she would forbid me if she found out.