The Jane Austen Book Club (23 page)

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 unpleasant 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 winter 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 everything 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 pass on Fifth Street, the
shhh
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, packing 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 bedroom 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 Jocelyn? 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. Damn Jocelyn.

“Should we take Allegra a book?” Daniel asked again.

“She's rereading
Persuasion
,” 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 passions. 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 Marin 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 Allegra. They stayed all night, dozing in their chairs, because mistakes 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?” Sylvia said. “I'm happy.”

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

T
he next Saturday, Sylvia organized a trip to the beach. She proposed sushi at Osaka in Bodega Bay, because Allegra would never say no to sushi 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, “instead 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 noticeable 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 shells 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 butterfly stitches on her temple. “Austen is so in love with sailors in
Persuasion
,” 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 lions 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 toweled off with her sweatshirt. “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 misery 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 quarreled over Sylvia's tardiness and Jocelyn's bossiness and Sylvia's malleability and Jocelyn's righteousness, 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 instantly. 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 Poodles
. 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 inspiring the urge toward rearrangement. They were lined with anemones, so thick they were squeezed together; there were limpets 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 relationship to the realities of roads and distances. In the back, Cat suddenly turned to Grigg. “Oh my God,” 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 police 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 glass. 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 rampaging 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 no
of course
about it. How many riots blamed on violent lesbians had Allegra heard about?

Or maybe that had been an impressed “of course.” Maybe Allegra felt a sneaking admiration for toilet-hurling lesbians.