A Walk with Jane Austen (22 page)

Now I'm looking at the beaches, which are mostly pebbles, big enough so you wouldn't want to walk on them barefoot. Big cement steps—two or three feet high—go straight into the water on one side of the beach just down the street from my hotel, so I sat there for a while today just looking at the gray water, wrapped up in my fleece, ignoring the spitting rain. Mostly it was picnickers on the beach—families with children, a father spending the day with his son, a beautiful little girl whose parents and grandparents could give her none of the attention she craved because they were too consumed with the baby and the dog.

I've walked down to the Cobb twice. Last night I couldn't help it; I couldn't be in Lyme and not try to find the Cobb and Granny's Teeth—the steps where Louisa Musgrove in
Persuasion
jumps into Captain Wentworth's arms, only he tells her not to jump—he thinks it's too high and too hard—and she does anyway and winds up unconscious on the Cobb. I bought some fudge, which turned out to be not so good and then got ice cream from a small store, from a guy who was leering at his teenage customers and had his hands all over the cone.

I walked back down today, past the ice-cream shops and candy stores, by stands for jacket potatoes and lovely seafood restaurants. There are children crabbing in the harbor and one brave and very white English guy in a Speedo wading into the water.

Jane writes so warmly of Lyme in
Persuasion:
“the remarkable situation of the town, the principal street almost hurrying into the water, the walk to the Cobb, skirting round the pleasant little bay.…with the
very beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of town.”
¹
And then of everything else around here:

I want to see Up Lyme and Pinny and Charmouth, to see the “green chasms between romantic rocks” and sit “in unwearied contemplation,” but I'm too tired to hike the cliffs, so tired I don't even much care. I would like to have come in November, like Anne, when it is quieter, with a party of friends. Jane vacationed here with her parents and sister and Henry and Eliza.
³
I'm sure that's where her enthusiasm comes from, the fun they had exploring together.

The beach is the backdrop of so many of my best memories. Not active memories, mostly just sitting-and-being memories, soaking in the sun and sitting in a chair by the tip of the waves, reading all the way to the end of C. S. Lewis's dramatic retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth in
Till We Have Faces
,wrapped in a towel against the cool clouds and intermittent sun, and a thousand other books. Walking into the quiet
evening blue hour when everything glows and softens, as if watching the edge of the world get tucked in for the night. There is something about that hour at the beach—the softness and stillness and noise—that fills me with comfort and reminds me of what is holy. Then watching the tops of my feet turn brown and feeling the tightness and aliveness of a slight burn, tasting the salt in the air, smelling fish—dead and alive— watching the sea oats on the dunes, feeling the freedom and terror of wearing an acceptable kind of nearly nothing and just slipping on shorts and a T-shirt until the late, late afternoon. I love it in all its seasons, but I suppose more in the warm sun than in the cold, gray rain.

My parents have a place in Cape Hatteras, North Carolina—a little strip of an island sticking out into the Atlantic. It is sort of a down-home southern beach. There are big dunes, campgrounds, and restaurants that seem to change every season. If you need groceries, you can go to Joe Bob's or the gas station. As a child, vacation meant Hawaii or camping under the pines at Myrtle Beach, where we went paddle boating in a lake with crocodiles, or the wide, wet slabs of Corpus Christi, where we hunted sand dollars in the edge of the waves.

My father tells about going down to Santa Cruz with his family as a boy or to Carmel, where Uncle John (who was actually Grammy's uncle)—John who had come to America first, who had worked his way across the continent building the Canadian railroad—had a stone house that he'd built with his own hands. My skinny little sun-soaked father sat on the beach shivering from the cold water, bitten by sand fleas. And before my father there was the family homestead in the little village on the Norwegian fjord. I don't know why I like to think about my family so much—these people who came before me, whom I am so biologically close to but whose stories I will never know. I have
pictures of all these Norwegian ancestors going back hundreds of years, lining the wall above my TV. One couple look like pilgrims, and one guy has a thick black beard and a balding head and one blue eye and one brown, and I think he must have been a lighthouse keeper, and I'm sure he knew the comfort of the waves.

I put
Emma
aside and started reading
Persuasion
again last night. I couldn't be in Lyme, on my way to Bath, and not read it.
Persuasion
just makes me happy—in a different way than
P&P
It is quieter, not so “sparkling.”
⁴
Its the product of an older Austen. How can anyone not love Anne? I am afraid, though, that I am too much like Mary, always thinking that someone else has something better—and always thinking myself ill and then eating more anyway.

Jane was so particular about men. This is what she says about Mr. Elliot, Annes cousin who is trying to win her over:

Jane attributes the feelings to Anne, but they must have been hers as well.

I am of two minds. One: if such a small failure as this is enough to disqualify a guy, how would anyone ever be good enough? And two: I am afraid about Jack, afraid this is his weakness, and afraid as a result that I cannot trust him.

He was always polished; he always said the right thing. (I know, I know. Now are we to fault guys for saying the right thing
and
for saying the wrong thing?) But it was almost like he knew precisely what would sound best in each situation, and that's what he said. A little too perfect.

There was one night, Monday, after we had sat by the river talking for so long, we walked back and went with a group to dinner at a little French crepe place. Greg, upon realizing that one of the guys who is a proctologist (or a “plumber,” as he calls himself) was a captive audience, launched into a long and detailed story involving kidney stones, shunts, catheters, an intern, and no anesthetic. I needed sleep. The noise of the conversation was too much for me. The shunts were too much for me. I alternately cringed quietly and put forth a great deal of effort to be pleasant, to what I'm sure was little effect.

When we all first sat down, Sara said to Jack, “Do you want to sit across from your wife?” and I laughed and said, “Oh, we just met yesterday.” Then he got this determined smile on his face and said in his kindest voice, “But thank you though.” As if he couldn't imagine a better compliment. There was something about it. I sensed that he was probably cringing inside, but he would never let on. And I thought I would have to watch him, to see if he always said what he thought other people wanted to hear regardless of what he actually thought.

I don't know. Maybe I am tired and crazy. And maybe to make an issue of this would be overly particular. Anne was right about Mr. Elliot. He was only there for the money; he could not be trusted. Jack, I am almost sure, can be.

I found the perfect connection through Exeter, thrilled because Jane set
Sense and Sensibility
here—Barton Park was four miles north of Exeter, she says. So I looked out on Marianne's countryside; only I'd seen so many rolling hills and fields that I couldn't tell any of them apart anymore, and all of this looked just like the rest of England to me. Perhaps the hills were more gently rolling, or maybe they were higher and the fields darker green under a gray sky. My powers of observation were completely diminished, and I was convinced the other side of the train had all the gorgeous views. (Again feeling like Mary, “My seat is damp. I'm sure Louisa has found a better.”)
¹
And I became afraid all my clothes smelled of the frying oil of Lyme.

I thought of how I love gossipy, kindhearted Mrs. Jennings, grave Colonel Brandon, wholehearted Marianne, and Elinor, who always exerts herself to do what's right, to be civil to everyone, to think the best of people, never to give rein to her emotions—at least until she finds that Edward Ferrars had not married Lucy Steele and was free to propose to her. Then she herself “burst [s] into tears of joy.”
²
“Her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them,” Jane says.
³
Only Elinor's method of governing is at times one of exacting and empty precision, in deep sorrow to prevent herself from saying anything at all simply because she has made a promise to the ingratiating, fawning Lucy Steele.

In my own life I've had trouble negotiating the balance between selfishness and self-expression, which is the core conflict of the Dash-woods. It is, I think, one of the constant daily struggles in relationships—what to do with your emotions, how much to express them or subject others to them. I feel things more strongly than the rest of my family. My parents and my brother are matter-of-fact and even, and then there is me, with this extra bundle of pure emotion. If I look like both my parents, I don't feel the way they do. Emotionally, I think they may secretly wonder about my parentage. I have always wanted to be one of those easy happy people, and I think for a while I pretended to be that way, but really I am much more of an Eeyore. I think in some ways I will always be a mystery to them.

This is the one thing my mother and I fought about growing up. She felt that I was imposing my bad moods on others; I thought I should be allowed to be depressed or sad if that's what I was feeling. She wanted me to exert myself. I was probably being a moody teenager, taking my moods out on others, or maybe I was feeding my feelings à la
Marianne. But those arguments, combined with a Christian culture that is incredibly uncomfortable with lamentation and rushes to happiness, left me with an impression that only positive emotions are good and that everything else needed to be at a minimum subdued and sometimes covered over with smiles and cheerful voices, insincere thanksgiving and praise. There is a way to be sad or angry without overly imposing those emotions on others like a petulant teenager, of course, but I did not understand that at the time.

I don't mean to imply that evangelical Christians are emotionally disabled, but there is a strain of evangelicalism, particularly among women I think, in which anything that isn't happy is viewed as dangerous. I can't abide that anymore. It doesn't work for me. I cannot be part of a religion that doesn't understand lament.