The Time of Her Life (26 page)

“I’ve just got to show you this, Janie! It’s magnificent. I know how awful it is to have to wait.” And Jane could remember
over the years that her mother had once drawn forth and unfurled from her tissue paper a spectacular doll from Sweden. A doll
unlike any other Jane had ever seen, a somber-faced, stalwart, brave-hearted doll. Once her mother had let her examine all
the intricacies of a two-foot-tall simulated wooden tree trunk from F.A.O. Schwarz that was cleverly hinged and opened into
the most perfectly furnished home for a family of Steiff mice. “Your father would be furious if he knew I let you see this,
but I can’t stand it for you—not knowing. But you have to act really surprised when you open it Christmas morning.” Another
year she had led Jane down to the cellar on the sly to let her see the amazing old-fashioned carnival in miniature that Avery
had found on one of his expeditions around the countryside. It consisted of an enameled Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and
airplane ride that all spun around in remarkable synchronization, just missing each other as they whirled. Avery had located
an artist who had reconditioned it and a jeweler who had fitted into its platform the workings of a music box, so that while
all the little rides circled and circled it played “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”

Christmas was wonderful in her household; it was magical, but it was also a day through which the hours
followed one another with increasing dependency. It was a day made of glass, and one small fissure early-on could etch its
way through the whole structure until finally the entire fabrication might shatter around their ears.

When Avery did arrive about eleven o’clock, he had an armful of gifts that he put around the tree. Jane didn’t move away from
the television, although she did turn her face up to her father when he came in to greet her and give her a kiss. He was looking
frail and drawn and dry like paper. When Avery wasn’t drinking anything at all for long stretches, his irritation was visible
and rather attractive. He assumed an aggressively disheveled look. Perhaps he had shaved much earlier that morning, but perhaps
it had not been since the night before. He had on an old green sweater that was transparent at one elbow and rumpled jeans,
and he wore an expression of a man vexed at being distracted from doing or saying some important thing. The whole attitude
was peculiarly suited to his rangy build and slightly misaligned features, and he carried himself rigidly as though he were
just a little sore all over.

When he made another trip outside, Claudia came in and was upset and frankly irritated at Jane. “What’s the matter with you?”
she said. “You’re really being a wet blanket. You’ll hurt your father’s feelings.” Claudia’s voice was hushed, as though she
didn’t want Avery to hear her, even though he was outside. And Jane understood that when her mother spoke in that terse undertone,
whatever suggestion she made was an imperative. So Jane did get up, trailing the blanket she was using as a robe, and moved
to the living room, where she settled dourly on the couch, and Claudia followed her.

“For God’s sake, Jane! You could get dressed! I asked you to get dressed!” She turned away from Jane and was suddenly anxious
rather than cross. “Don’t ruin this.” She stood for a moment looking out at Avery and opening and closing her hands by her
sides; then she turned back to Jane once more, and she was angry again. “God, it’s depressing to have you dragging around
like this. You could be that considerate of your father. And of me. It’s Christmas. You can’t stay like that in those raggy
pajamas!”

Jane’s loyalties and the affections of her whole lifetime were frozen on this particular Christmas morning, and she wanted
no part of anything Claudia was saying. She didn’t answer at all. Claudia just stood there in the center of the room, and
then she turned her attention back to Avery, who was approaching the house with an armload of wood. As her mother moved forward
to open the door, Jane’s attention was suddenly riveted to her. All her senses were alerted.

No one else would have heard her mother’s footsteps on the pale rug unless, like Jane, he or she watched Claudia’s feet as
they left a soft impression on the plush pile in their delicate sling-back suede shoes. But Jane heard the heels of the shoes
smack softly against her mother’s sheerly stockinged feet in the smallest sound of flesh and leather. As her father came in
with the wood, and her mother moved forward to close the door—just as her two parents passed each other—Jane was astonished
momentarily to see her mother so sinuous and silky, somehow insinuating in contrast with her father’s efficient conservation
of movement. No grace there, today, but a lean elegance that was entirely masculine. Jane was struck by her mother’s fragile
ankles
and slim legs beneath the full skirt that flicked around her knees. She noticed the curve of her mother’s bust and waist,
and the absurd puffed shoulders of the tapered sleeves of her velvet dress. Jane was embarrassed, and filled with some other
discomfort for which she had no name, to see that her mother was physically so frivolous, so useless to a winter’s day. And
when her mother spoke to her father, it made Jane cringe to hear the subtle modulation, the slight, soft lilt that was both
condescending, somehow, and gratingly deferential.

Avery set about building a fire in the fireplace, and the labor suited him. As he knelt on one knee to crumple paper and arrange
the wood, Claudia glanced over at him from across the room where she was sitting on the edge of the couch. His mood was amiable
but edged with a sort of accusatory fretfulness, and it was powerfully erotic to Claudia. He exuded an air of modest suffering,
and she knew exactly how that slight petulance resolved itself in slow and deliberate lovemaking that would begin with a selfish
insistence on his part, so at first she would respond a little and then become irritated and aloof. Finally the two of them
would become absolutely aware of the other one in lazy, self-indulgent sex that would be so leisurely and slightly grudging
of the other that it would have a sullen and rather dangerous quality about it. She was so absorbed in watching him that she
was not breathing for a moment, and she caught herself and got up and redirected her attention to the gifts and their arrangement
around the tree.

“I’m going to get some champagne for all of us,” she said. “I’ve got wonderful things for brunch. I’ll fix a tray.”

Avery was trying to get the fire to light, and he didn’t turn around. “Not anything for me. I can’t stay too long. Alice is
fixing a special dinner.” The fire would not ignite, and he didn’t see Claudia stop on her way to the kitchen, for a second,
like a puppet with every string drawn taut in mid-motion. But she moved forward again without comment. When she returned with
the tray, however, there were three glasses of wine and three plates of heated streusel. All she did was put it down on the
small table she had placed by the tree, and she didn’t call it to Avery’s attention when the three of them sat down on the
floor to open their gifts. He took a plate and a glass without even thinking about it, and he also began to come out of his
air of being put upon. Claudia made several trips to the kitchen until finally she had laid out a feast on the table before
them. Avery sat down across from her and began to cajole Jane, who was still huddled in her blanket, still dressed in her
pajamas. He held out a small rectangular present to her.

“Listen,” he said to her, “I know that we usually don’t give practical kinds of things for presents, but you’ve gotten so
old now that I knew you’d be tired of playthings.” He looked worried for a minute. “You don’t already have an electric toothbrush,
do you?” He handed the present across to her, and she tried to smile at him when she unwrapped it. It was an antique amethyst
and pearl locket; the amethyst was her birthstone, and she meant to ask him where he had found it, because he took great pleasure
in unearthing these amazing presents. She meant to tell him that it was beautiful, but she was terribly tired. In fact, it
seemed to her that it was the day itself that embodied exhaustion. She felt that it was a day that had already happened so
that the minutes
were sticky with previous events and unnaturally slow to pass. The day had happened, but not in any mysterious or thrilling
way that allowed her the wondrous sense of déjà vu. It was not at all intriguing; what lay ahead was a long, flat sheet of
hours that had been worn-out. So Jane held the locket in her hand and then put it away in its box and put the box down beside
her. She hadn’t even remembered to say thank you, although both her parents waited anxiously. And both Avery and Claudia took
her seeming sullenness as a repudiation of themselves. But they didn’t say anything. They moved on to other gifts.

Claudia kept the glasses filled with champagne as they opened the beautiful packages. When she was handed a gift, she would
trade the box from hand to hand, nervously strip off some of the paper, and then jump up to get something else from the kitchen,
“You open one while I get the pâté.” She didn’t like to receive gifts, but Avery and Jane always gave her things, anyway.
This year Jane gave her a tea rose weekender set she had ordered from the Bloomingdale’s catalogue and put on her mother’s
charge. Jane was a master of 800 numbers and the American Express card. It was how she shopped for most of the gifts she gave.

Claudia thanked her in flight; she opened the package and exclaimed over it after she had put it down and was moving through
the kitchen door trailing words behind her. “… exactly like roses… lovely.”

But Avery had found such a perfect present that when Claudia came back into the room and opened it, it held her right to the
spot. She was standing as she peeled away the paper, but she settled down on the rug immediately. With immense satisfaction
she leafed through
the dozen or more record albums she had unwrapped.

“God! Where did you get these? My God, Danny and the Juniors! Oh, and, Avery, look at this! The Platters. This isn’t even
a copy, is it? I mean, these are the real records. Bobby Blue Bland. And you found an Ink Spots album. This is incredible!
Leslie Gore. She was so wonderfully awful. The Shirelles! Where’d you ever find these? I was in… what… seventh grade? You
must have been in ninth. Were you still in junior high? Where in the world did you find these?”

“If you watch the late shows on television,” Avery said. “They’re advertised right along with the Ginsu knives and the single-hand
ratchet. The same number to call, too. ‘Call right now before our limited supplies run out!’ I couldn’t resist them. They
probably are copies of the originals. The sound won’t be very good. I think the copyrights run out, and—”

Claudia interrupted him; she hadn’t really been listening. “Look at this, Avery! The Penguins. Oh, God, here’s ‘Earth Angel,’
and look, The Platters. ‘Twilight Time.’”

Avery was animated, too, and pleased. He sat up and rocked back and forth dramatically as he assumed an exaggerated and tremulous
falsetto and sang:

Heavenly shades of night are falling,

It’s twilight time.

Deep in the dusk your voice is calling,

It’s twilight time….

“No, that’s not right,” Claudia said. “What is it? Not ‘deep in the dusk.’ I don’t think so. Let’s play them. Let’s put them
on now.”

Jane was unsettled by this new development, by all this goodwill. And she was strangely hurt and jealous. “You were probably
just drunk when you ordered them,” she said suddenly. “I’ve seen those ads. They come on real late. I bet you were just drunk.”

Her parents looked at her with utterly blank faces. In this household over the years the one thing that no one ever said when
Avery was sober was that Avery was ever drunk. It would be a vile, cruel, and harmful idea to hold out in the light. Avery
sometimes said that he had been through a rough time. Sometimes he had been working too hard. Quite often he apologized for
having been depressed. But they didn’t ever say that Avery was drunk, and it displeased Claudia more than Avery. She stood
up in astonishment and was too surprised to say anything right away.

“Jane! What are you doing? Why would you say something like that? Avery went all over the county to antique stores to find
that locket for you….” She had no idea in the world why Jane seemed determined to make them all unhappy.

Everything about Avery signified unexpected injury. He was pained, but all the more benevolent. Far be it from him to take
offense, and he behaved as if Jane had not said a word, except that in everything he did there was a little hesitancy. He
quickly fell into the role of being in the house on sufferance, careful not to make a misstep.

He settled back into his comfortable position on the rug, leaning against the table with his drink in his hand. “Janie, I
think that at least you ought to open that big present right there,” he said. He leaned forward to push the large box toward
Jane, who sat like an Indian beneath
her blanket with its edges draped over her forearms and her forearms wrapped around herself as she kept an eagle eye on her
parents. She looked at the box in front of her with no enthusiasm. To have attacked her father left her feeling as brittle
and hollowed-out as a winter-dried reed in the meadow.

For a few moments she made no move at all, and when this registered on Claudia, who was still bewildered, she looked over
at Jane slowly. Claudia had picked up two records and had been studying the backs of the album covers because she was so unnerved.
Now she said to Jane, “Is there some reason you want to ruin this day?”

“Oh, Claudia, leave it alone,” Avery began in an apologetic tone, a man contrite, but she didn’t pause.

“Your father has gone to a lot of trouble for you. What’s in that box is really a special present. I don’t know why you’re
so sulky. Why don’t you go on and open it?” Jane knew that there was tremendous anger in her mother’s intention that was withheld
from the rigidly civilized tone of her reprimand. In response she felt a great welling up of fury at once again being treated
like a child by her own mother. She didn’t make any comment at all but removed the plaid taffeta bow and the glossy green
paper while her parents huddled over the box to admire the gift. It was an elaborate stereo tape and phonograph component
system. Avery had been looking into it for some time, he said, and he thought he had come up with the best of the best. He
had put the package together from several sources. And Jane watched him as he removed the various pieces from the box with
the same care with which he had handled the Celestron telescope a long time ago. These mechanical
things, so precise and carefully rendered, they fascinated him, and he talked about advanced technology, tone, the clarification
of sound, and so forth. Jane thanked him, but he wasn’t really aiming his comments at her or Claudia; he was simply entertaining
himself.