The Jane Austen Book Club Part 16

Should they go to the same college just to be together? If they both wanted to be at the same college, should one of them go elsewhere just to avoid be-ing together? Could their relations.h.i.+p pa.s.s the test of a separa-tion? Should it be made to? Who loved whom most? They heard sirens. They kissed.

Daniel's brother had been hit by a car driven by a sixteen-year-old. Andy was killed instantly, which was the only small mercy, so Daniel didn't have to spend the rest of his life thinking that if he'd gone home the minute he heard the fire trucks he could have said good-bye.

Sylvia had thought Daniel's mother a peculiarly affectless woman, polite but distant. This became even more obvious after Sylvia and Daniel were married and had children. Where were the constant complaints about never seeing the grandkids? And where was all the sobbing and hand-wringing when Allegra- such a beautiful girl!-turned out to be gay and would likely have no children of her own?

Sylvia was somewhat affectless herself, but in the general noise of her own dramatic family, no one, including Sylvia, had noticed this yet. She liked Daniel's mother okay-the woman hardly cast a shadow, what was not to like?-but she would have been insulted to be told they were similar. On the day Andy died she watched Daniel's mother crumple like paper. Something moved into her face that never moved out.

InPersuasion, Jane Austen mentions the death of a child. She is brief and dismissive. The Musgroves,she says, "had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before he reached his twentieth year." d.i.c.k Mus-grove was not loved. When he went to sea, he was not missed. a.s.signed to a boat under Captain Wentworth's command, he died in a way never specified, and only death made him valuable to his family.

These are the parents Austen's heroine, Anne Elliot, describes later in the book as excellent. "What a blessing," Anne says, "to young people to be in such hands!"

There was traffic on the causeway; the lanes were glutted. Sylvia inched along. Bad things did happen.

Now there was gla.s.s, now a fractured car on the shoulder of the road, the back door on the driver's side folded nearly in two. The people had been removed, no way to guess what shape they were in. As soon as she pa.s.sed this, Sylvia was able to resume a proper freeway speed.

It took Jocelyn fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, another five to find the nurse in the emergency room who'd admitted Alle-gra. "Are you a relative?" the nurse asked, and then explained very politely that the hospital couldn't release information on Al-legra's condition to anyone who wasn't.

Jocelyn believed in rules. She believed in exceptions to rules. Not only for herself, but for anyone just like her. She described with equal courtesy the scene she was capable of making. "I don't get embarra.s.sed," she said. "And I'm not tired. Her mother is waiting for me to call."

The nurse noted that Allegra was also the name of an allergy medication. This was spitefully done and inappropriate, too. When Jocelyn looked back on it later, remembering everything but with the anxiety over Allegra removed, she was quite angry about this part. What a flippant thing to say under the circ.u.m-stances. And it was a beautiful name. It was from Longfellow.

But then the nurse conceded that X rays had been taken. Alle-gra was in a brace. There was concern about a head injury, but she was conscious. Dr. Yep was in charge -of the case. And no, Jocelyn couldn't see Allegra. Only her relatives could see her.

Jocelyn was in the midst of explaining why the nurse was mis-taken about this as well, when Daniel arrived. He walked in as if it hadn't been months since they'd spoken, and put his arms around Jocelyn.

He smelled just exactly like Daniel.

Times came when you needed someone's arms around you. Mostly Jocelyn liked being single, but sometimes she thought about that. "She's been X-rayed. Possible head injury. They won't tell me anything," she said into his shoulder. "I have to call Sylvia right away.

By the time Sylvia saw her, Allegra had been immobile for al-most two hours and was furious about it.

Sylvia, Daniel, and Jo-celyn circled her with white faces, forced smiles. They agreed that it always was Allegra getting hurt, never the boys. Remem-ber how she'd broken her foot falling off the monkey bars?

Re-member how she'd dislocated her collarbone, tumbling from the elm tree? Remember how she'd crushed her elbow in that bike incident? Accident-p.r.o.ne, they agreed, which made Allegra madder andmadder. "I'm not hurt at all," she said. "I fell maybe four feet and I landed on a mat. I can't believe they brought me here. I didn't even black out."

In fact she had lost consciousness, and she suspected as much. She'd no memory of the fall, nothing until the ambulance came. And certainly she must have dropped more than four feet. She knew about the mat only because she'd seen it. But since she couldn't remember the details, she felt free to adjust them. How was that lying?

And right then, in the hospital with everyone standing around her bed as though it were the last scene of The Wizard of Oz movie, it seemed that they were all colluding to make a big deal out of nothing. In the context of the white-water rafting, the s...o...b..arding, the surfing, for G.o.d's sake the parachuting, Alle-gra had done, she felt her record was pretty clean. It looked bad to her parents only because they didn't know about the white-water rafting, the s...o...b..arding, the surfing, the parachuting.

Finally Dr. Yep entered with the X rays. Allegra couldn't move an inch to see, but she could never see anything on X rays anyway. She could never see the colours of stars through a tele-scope, never find birds through binoculars, paramecia through microscopes. This was irritating, but not on a daily basis.

Dr. Yep was talking with her parents, showing them this and that on Allegra's ribs, her skull. The doctor had a very pleasant voice, which was nice because she talked for a long time. After cataloguing the many things that might have been on Allegra's X rays, but happily were not, Dr. Yep came to the point. Just as Allegra had said, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. Still, they wanted to keep her overnight for observation and maximum annoyance. Dr. Yep claimed Allegra had given some bizarre answers to questions in the ambulance-what day of the week it was, what was the month. Allegra denied this.

"They just took me so literally," she said. She didn't remember her answers, only that the emergency techs, buzzing about like gnats, had provoked her. Perhaps she'd quoted a little d.i.c.kinson. In what universe was that a crime? At least she could finally be un-strapped, move from side to side again. It was embarra.s.sing, when she did this, to learn that she had a bandage on her temple, blood on her cheek.

Apparently she'd gashed her head.

It took another forty minutes to finish the paperwork and get her checked in upstairs. She was in quite a bit of pain by then, bruised, stiff, with a dreadful headache beginning to stir. Noth-ing the couple of Tylenol she'd been offered were going to man-age. She needed real drugs; she hoped she wasn't going to be the only one to think so just because no bones were broken.

The nurse on duty turned out to be Callie Abramson. Allegra had gone to high school with Callie, though they hadn't been in the same year or run in the same circles. Callie'd been yearbook and student government. Allegra, field hockey and art. Still it was nice to see a familiar face in a strange place. Sylvia, at least, was delighted.

While helping Allegra into bed, Callie told her that Travis Browne had become a Muslim. Hard-core, Callie said, whatever that meant. Allegra didn't suppose she'd ever exchanged two words with Travis.

Brittany Auslander had been arrested for stealing computers from the language lab at the university.

Everybody but Callie had always thought she was such a good girl. Callie herself was married-no one you'd know, she said- and had two boys. And Melinda Pande turned out gay.

"Hard-core?" Allegra asked. She remembered how Callie had gotten so thin everyone suspected she was anorexic. How she tried out for cheerleading anyway, like a stick figure in a short skirt, her sharp little face shouting to give her an F, give her an I. How she'd freaked out one spring during finals and been taken to the counsellor's office in hysterics, and they'd found pills in her locker, either to help herdiet or to kill herself; no one seemed to know, but it didn't stop them from saying.

Now here she was, thin but not too thin, working, smiling like someone's mom, and telling Allegra how nice it was to see her again. Allegra was very happy for her. She looked at Callie's photos of her boys and she got a whole vibe off them of a toler-ant, loving, noisy home. She thought Callie was probably a very good mother.

Callie didn't seem to remember much about Allegra at all, but wasn't that really what you wanted from the kids at your high school?

Sylvia and Daniel drove back to the house together to collect some things for Allegra-her toothbrush, her slippers. She'd asked for a milk shake, so they'd pick that up, too. "She was very emotional," Dr.

Yep had told Sylvia privately. Clearly she thought it a matter of some concern.

Sylvia heard it as a rea.s.surance. Relief turned to happiness. There was her Allegra, then, undamaged, unchanged. She would rather have taken Allegra home, yet there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to complain about. A narrow escape. An-other lucky, lucky day in Sylvia's lucky, lucky life.

"How's Pam?" she asked Daniel charitably. Sylvia still hadn't met Pam. Allegra said she was every bit as tough and opinion-ated as a family-practice lawyer would have to be.

"Pam's good. Did Jocelyn seem a bit subdued to you? Of course, she was worried. We were all worried."

"Jocelyn's fine. Busy running the world."

"Thank G.o.d," Daniel said. "I wouldn't want to live in any world Jocelyn wasn't running." As if that weren't exactly what he'd done, left the world Jocelyn ran, for one she didn't. Sylvia thought this, but was too relieved, too grateful (though not to Daniel) to say it.

Seeing him in the house again gave Sylvia a peculiar feeling, as though she were dreaming or waking up and couldn't tell which. Who was she, really-the Sylvia without Daniel or the Sylvia with? In some ways she felt that she'd aged years in the months he'd been gone.

In other ways she'd become her parents' daughter again. After Daniel had left, she'd found herself remembering things from her childhood, things she hadn't thought of in forever. As though Daniel had been an interruption that went on most of her life.

Suddenly she was dreaming in Spanish again. She found herself thinking more and more about her mother's roses, her father's politics, her grandmother's soaps.

Divorce itself was an inevitable soap opera, of course. The roles were prewritten, no way to do them differently, no way to make them your own. She could see how it was killing Daniel not to be the hero in his own divorce.

"You have to remind yourself that it isn't just the good Daniel who left," Jocelyn had told her. "The bad Daniel is gone, too. Wasn't he insufferable sometimes? Make a list of everything you didn't like." But when Sylvia tried, the things she didn't like often turned out also to be the things she did like. She would focus on some un-pleasant memory-how she'd set out a punishment for one of the children, only to have him grant a parole. How he would ask her what she wanted for Christmas and then shake his head and tell her she didn't want that, after all. "You'll put it in the cupboard and never use it," when she wanted a bread machine. "It looks just like the coat you already have," when she'd shown him a win-ter jacket she liked. It was so smug. She really couldn't stand it.

Then the memory would turn on her. The children had grown up fine; she was proud of them all. The present Daniel would get her would be something she would never have thought of. Usually it would be wonderful.

One night several weeks before Daniel had taken her out to dinner and asked for a divorce, she'd woken up and seen that he wasn't in bed. She found him in the living room, in the armchair, looking out at the rain. The wind was shrill against the windows, rocking the trees. Sylvia loved a storm at night. It made every-thing simple. It made you content just to be dry.

Obviously it was having a different effect on Daniel. "Are you happy?" he had asked.

This sounded like the start of a long conversation. Sylvia didn't have on her robe or her slippers. She was cold. She was tired. "Yes," she said, not because she was, but because she wanted to keep things short. And she might be happy. She couldn't think of anything making her unhappy. She hadn't asked herself that question for a very long time.

"I can't always tell," Daniel said.

Sylvia heard this as a criticism. It was a complaint he'd made before-she was too subdued, too reticent. When would she learn to let go? Water poured from the gutters onto the deck. Sylvia could hear a car pa.s.s on Fifth Street, theshhh of its tires. "I'm going back to bed," she said.

"You go on," Daniel told her. "I'll be along in a minute."

But he wasn't, and she fell asleep. She had a familiar dream. She was in a foreign city and no one spoke the languages she spoke. She tried to call home, but her cell phone was dead. She put the wrong money in the pay phone, and when she finally got it right, a strange man answered. "Daniel's not here," he told her. "No, I don't know where he went. No, I don't know when he'll be back."

In the morning she tried to speak to Daniel, but he was no longer willing. "It was nothing," he said. "I don't know what that was about. Forget it."

Now Daniel was down the hallway in Allegra's room, pack-ing her things. "Should we take her a book?" he called. "Do you know what she's reading?"

Sylvia didn't answer immediately. She'd gone into the bed-room to phone the boys and noticed she had five messages. Four were hang-ups, telemarketers presumably, and one was from Grigg. "I was wondering if we could talk," he said. "Would you have lunch with me this week? Give me a call."

Daniel entered just in time to hear the end. She could tell he was surprised. Sylvia, less so. She saw Jocelyn's fingers all over this. Sylvia had always suspected Grigg was intended for her. Of course, she didn't want him, but when had that ever stopped Jo-celyn? He was far too young. She could see Daniel not asking her who that was. "Grigg Harris," she told him. "He's in my Jane Austen book club." Let Daniel think another man was interested in her. A suitable man.

A man who read Jane Austen.

A man with whom she now had to have an awkward lunch. d.a.m.n Jocelyn.

"Should we take Allegra a book?" Daniel asked again.

"She's rereadingPersuasion," Sylvia said. "We both are."

Daniel phoned Diego, who was their oldest, an immigration lawyer in L.A. Diego had been named for Sylvia's father and was the one with his grandfather's political pa.s.sions. In other ways, Diego was the child most like Daniel, an early adult, dependable, responsible. The way Daniel used to be.

Sylvia phoned Andy, named for Daniel's brother. Andy was their easygoing child. He worked for a landscaping firm in Mann and called on his cell whenever he was eating a really great meal or looking at something beautiful. In Andy's life these things happened frequently. "The most amazing sunset!" he would say. "The most amazing tapas!"

Diego offered to come home and had to be convinced it wasn't necessary. Andy, who could have made the trip in little more than an hour, didn't think to make the offer.

Daniel and Sylvia went back to the hospital and sat with Alle-gra. They stayed all night, dozing in their chairs, because mis-takes could happen in hospitals-doctors got distracted by their personal lives, there were romances and jiltings, people went in with fevers and came out with amputations. That was Sylvia's motivation, anyway. Daniel stayed because he wanted to be there.

It was the first night he and Sylvia had spent together since he'd moved out.

"Daniel," Sylvia said. It was two in the morning, or else it was three. Allegra was sleeping, her face turned toward Sylvia on her pillow. She was dreaming. Sylvia could see her eyes move under her lids.

Allegra's breath was quick and audible. "Daniel?" Syl-via said. "I'm happy."

Daniel didn't answer. He, too, might have been asleep.

The next Sat.u.r.day, Sylvia organized a trip to the beach. She pro-posed sus.h.i.+ at Osaka in Bodega Bay, because Allegra would never say no to sus.h.i.+ and Osaka was the best they'd ever had. She proposed a run on the sand for Sahara and Thembe, because Jocelyn would never say no to that. There were so few places a Ridgeback could safely run off-leash. They weren't the kind of dogs who came when they were called. Unless they belonged to Jocelyn.

A trip to the beach would get everyone out of the Valley heat for a day. "And I think I'll invite Grigg,"

Sylvia told Jocelyn, "in-stead of having lunch with him." Group activities, your key to avoiding unwanted intimacy. This was a conversation on the phone, and there'd been a no-ticeable pause on Jocelyn's end. Sylvia hadn't told Jocelyn about the lunch, so perhaps she was just surprised. "All right," she said finally. "I guess we can fit another person into the car." Which made no sense. If they took Jocelyn's van, as they surely would with the dogs, they could fit a couple more people in.

And a good thing, too, because first Grigg said he couldn't. His sister Cat was visiting. And then he called back and said Cat really wanted to go to the beach, was in fact insistent on it, and could they both come? Cat turned out to look a lot like Grigg, only fatter and without the eyelashes.

The tide had left the graceful curves of its going etched into the sand. The wind came in off the water and the surf was wild. Instead of tidy sets, the waves were broken to bits, white water and green and brown and blue, all battered together. A few sh.e.l.ls were washed over at the water's edge, small and perfect, but everyone was too ecologically well behaved to pick these up.

Allegra was looking out to the ocean, her hair blowing into her eyes, a delicate tattoo of b.u.t.terfly st.i.tches on her temple. "Austen is so in love with sailors inPersuasion," she said to Sylvia. "What profession would she admire today?"

"Firemen?" Sylvia guessed. "Just like everyone else?" And then they stopped talking because Jocelyn was approaching, and discussing the book in advance of the meeting, though tolerated, was not encouraged.

The dogs were ecstatic. Sahara raced along the sand with a rope of seaweed in her mouth, dropping it to bark at some sea li-ons sunning on a rock in the surf. The sea lions barked back; it was all very friendly.

Thembe found a dead gull and rolled over it, so that Jocelyn had to drag him into the icy water and scrub him down with wet sand. Her feet turned white as a fish belly; her teeth chattered- a rare achievement in August. She was looking very nice, her hair tied back with a scarf, her skin polished by the wind. At least Sylvia thought so.

Sylvia was managing never to be alone with Grigg. Jocelyn, she noticed, almost seemed to be doing the same thing. They sat together on the sand while Jocelyn towelled off with her sweat-s.h.i.+rt. "When I was driving to the hospital," Sylvia said, "I thought if Allegra was all right I would be the happiest woman in the world. And she was, and I was. But today the sink is backed up and there are roaches in the garage and I don't have the time to deal with any of it. The newspaper is filled with mis-ery and war. Already I have to remind myself to be happy. And you know, if it were the other way, if something had happened to Allegra, I wouldn't have to remind myself to be unhappy. I'd be unhappy the rest of my life. Why should unhappiness be so much more powerful than happiness?"

"One difficult member spoils a whole group," Jocelyn agreed. "One disappointment ruins a whole day."

"One infidelity wipes out years of faithfulness."

"It takes ten weeks to get into shape and ten days to get out of it."

"That's my point," said Sylvia. "We don't stand a chance." Jocelyn was closer and more dear to Sylvia than her own sister ever had been. They had quarrelled over Sylvia's tardiness and Jocelyn's bossiness and Sylvia's malleability and Jocelyn's righ-teousness, but they had never had a serious fight. All those years before, Sylvia had taken Daniel from Jocelyn, and Jocelyn had simply gone on loving them both. Cat came and sat down beside them. Sylvia had liked Cat in-stantly. She had a loud laugh, like a duck quacking, and she laughed a lot. "Grigg just loves dogs," she said. "We were never allowed to have one, so when he was three he decided to be one. We had to pat him on the head and tell him what a good dog he was. Give him little treats.

"And there was this book he absolutely loved.The Green Poo-dles. Kind of a mystery, took place in Texas, a long-lost cousin from England, a missing painting. And lots and lots of dogs. Our sister Amelia used to read it to us at bedtime. Books and dogs, that's our Grigg."

Allegra had discovered tide pools in the hollows of rocks and shouted for the others to come see. Each pool was a world, tiny but complete. The pools had the charm of dollhouses without in-spiring the urge toward rearrangement. They were lined with anemones, so thick they were squeezed together; there were lim-pets and an occasional urchin, abalone the size of fingernails, and a minnow or two. It was a preview of lunch.

On the way home Jocelyn made a wrong turn. They were lost in the wilds of Glen Ellen for half an hour, which was so unlike Jocelyn. Sylvia was in the front with the MapQuest map, which, now that it was needed, appeared to bear no relations.h.i.+p to the realities of roads and distances. In the back, Cat suddenly turned to Grigg. "Oh my G.o.d," she said. "Did you see that sign? To Los Guilicos? You remember the Los Guilicos School for wayward girls? I wonder if it's still there."

"My folks were always threatening my sisters with the Los Guilicos School," Grigg told the rest of the car. "It was a family joke. They'd read about it in the paper. It was supposed to be a pretty tough place."

"There was a riot there," Cat said. "I don't think I was even born yet. It was started by some girls from L.A., so I guess it got a lot of play in the L.A. papers. It lasted four whole days. The po-lice kept arresting girls and taking them away and saying now it was all under control, and the next night the girls who were left would start in again. They broke windows and got drunk, fought with knives from the kitchen and bits of broken gla.s.s. They tore up the toilets and threw them out the windows with the rest of the furniture. Went into town and broke the windows there, too. Eventually the National Guard was called in, and even they couldn't control things. Four days! Gangs of rampag-ing teenage girls. I always thought it would make a great movie."

"I never heard of that," Sylvia said. "What started it?"

"I don't know," Cat said. "It was blamed on violent lesbians."

"Ah," Allegra said, "of course," when Sylvia could see noof course about it. How many riots blamed on violent lesbians had Allegra heard about?

Or maybe that had been an impressed "of course." Maybe Al-legra felt a sneaking admiration for toilet-hurling lesbians.

"I used to have nightmares," Grigg said, "where I was being chased by wayward girls with knives."