The Jane Austen Book Club (4 page)

The next day at school, Daniel was Sylvia's boyfriend and Tony was Jocelyn's. It was much talked of in the halls. Jocelyn had made no objection, because if she went along, it would be the first time in the history of the world that such a rearrangement suited all parties equally, and also because she wasn't in love with Daniel. Now that she thought about it, Daniel really was perfectly suited to Sylvia. Sylvia needed someone more serious than Tony. Someone who would calm her down on those occasions when she saw that the world was too awful to live in. Someone who wouldn't spend an afternoon kissing her best friend.

Besides, Tony had given her Pridey. And kissing Tony hadn't been too foul. It probably would be worse, though, without the rain and the steam and the guilt. Jocelyn had figured out enough about the way things worked to know
that.

W
hat makes me unhappiest about
Emma
,” said Allegra, “are the class issues about her friend Harriet. In the end, Emma, the new,
improved Emma, the chastened Emma, understands that Harriet wasn't good enough to marry the odious Elton after all. When there was some hope that her natural father was a gentleman, she would have been, but once it's established that he was in trade, then Harriet is lucky to get a farmer.”

It was now late enough that the heaters never cycled off. They hummed and puffed, and those of us seated next to them were too hot, the rest too cold. No coffee remained but the nasty bits at the bottoms of the cups, and the crème de menthe squares were gone—clear signs that the evening was coming to an end. Some of us had headaches.

“The class stuff in
Emma
is complicated.” Bernadette was settled back in her chair, her belly mounding under her dress, her feet tucked up like a girl's. She had taken yoga for years and could put her feet into some astonishing places. “First, there's the fact of Harriet's illegitimacy, about which Austen seems quite liberal.”

She was by no means finished, but Allegra interrupted. “She says it's a stain if unbleached by nobility or wealth.” We had just begun to suspect that Allegra might not like Austen as much as the rest of us. So far it was only a suspicion; nothing she'd said had been unfair. We were keeping watch, but
honi soit qui mal y pense.

“I think Jane is being ironic there,” Prudie suggested. She was next to a heater. Her pale, polished cheeks were delicately flushed. “She has an ironic wit, I think some readers miss that. I'm often ironic myself, especially in e-mail. Sometimes my friends ask, Was that a joke?”

“Was that a joke?” Allegra asked.

Bernadette went steadily on. “Then there's the case of Robert Martin. Surely we're intended to take Mr. Knightley's side on the
question of Robert Martin. Only a farmer, but at the end Emma says it will be a great pleasure to get to know him.”

“We all have a sense of level,” said Jocelyn. “It may not be based on class exactly anymore, but we still have a sense of what we're entitled to. People pick partners who are nearly their equal in looks. The pretty marry the pretty, the ugly the ugly.” She paused. “To the detriment of the breed.”

“Was that a joke?” Prudie asked.

Sylvia had spoken very little all night and Jocelyn was worried about it. “What should we read next?” Jocelyn asked her. “You pick.”

“I'm in the mood for
Sense and Sensibility.
”

“I love that one,” Bernadette said. “It's maybe my favorite, except for
Pride and Prejudice.
Though I love
Emma.
I always forget how much until I reread it. My very favorite bit is about the strawberries. Mrs. Elton in her hat, with her basket.” She thumbed through the pages. The relevant corner had been folded back, but so had several other corners; it was little help. “Here we have it,” she said. “ ‘Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready. . . . Strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of . . . “delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries . . . ” ' ”

Bernadette read us the whole thing. It was a wonderful passage, though quite long when done aloud.

J
ocelyn's relationship with Tony lasted into their senior year, and its end was unfortunately timed so as to make her miss the Winter Ball. She'd already bought a dress, a tiered, lacy, off-the-shoulder silver thing that she loved so much she would have made things go another couple of weeks if she'd been able. But
by then every word he said was an irritation to her, and he did insist on continuing to talk.

Three years later Sylvia and Daniel married, and it was a formal affair, not quite their style. Jocelyn always suspected it had been planned that way so she would finally have a place to wear her dress. She brought a date, one in a series of boyfriends and lasting no longer than the others, but immortalized in the wedding pictures—raising his glass, standing with his arm around Jocelyn, seated at a table with Jocelyn's mother, the two of them deep in serious conversation.

Sylvia and Jocelyn were in college now, and they joined a consciousness-raising group that met on campus, second floor of the International House. At their third meeting, Jocelyn spoke about the summer of Mike and Steven. She hadn't meant to take a great deal of time with it, but she'd never told anyone, not even Sylvia, much about the night of the dance. She found herself crying all through the telling. She'd forgotten, until she was in the midst of it, how Bryan had looked at her to be sure she was watching, and then stuck his finger into his mouth and pulled it out.

The other women were outraged on her behalf. She'd been raped, some of them argued. It was a shame no charges had been pressed.

A shame. After the initial relief, now that the story existed in the open air and could be looked at, what Jocelyn noticed most was how unresisting she'd been. She saw, as if from above, her own inert body in the strapless dress and thin cardigan, reclining on the lounge chair. The suggestion that Bryan should have been made to face some consequences came at her like an accusation. She should have done something. Why hadn't she put up a fight? The whole time Bryan was fingering her, she was still hoping to win his good opinion!

No one else blamed her. Culturally programmed passivity, they said. The fairy-tale-princess imperative. But Jocelyn grew more and more humiliated. There were two women in the group who really
had
been raped, one of them by her own husband and repeatedly. Jocelyn felt she'd made a big deal over nothing. With her silence, she'd given Bryan a power he didn't deserve. She wasn't about to let some frat-boy asshole have a thing to say about who she was.

Who was she?

“What's wrong with me?” she asked Sylvia later. It wasn't a question for the group. “The simplest thing. Falling in love. Falling. Why can't I do that?”

“You love dogs.”

Jocelyn waved that angrily away. “It doesn't count. That's too easy. Hitler did that.”

She didn't go back to a fourth evening. Raising her consciousness had turned out to be one more thing that left her feeling ashamed, and she was done with feeling ashamed.

Daniel became a lobbyist in Sacramento, for an Indian tribe, a wild-river group, and the Japanese government. He was urged, from time to time, to run for office, but this was easily resisted. Politics, he said, was a foot-to-mouth occupation. Sylvia worked at the state library, in the California History Room. Jocelyn managed accounts at a small vineyard; her own dog kennel was still some years in her future and would never provide for her complete support. Pridey lived to be sixteen, and his last day on earth, it was Sylvia and Daniel who took off work to drive him to the vet with Jocelyn. They sat with her on the speck of grass outside the office, where Jocelyn held him while he died. Then they all sat in the car together. No one was able to stop crying long enough to see the road home.

H
ow are you doing?” Jocelyn asked Sylvia. They had one minute alone together in the kitchen and a hundred things to say that could not be said in front of Allegra. Allegra was Daniel's darling, his only daughter, and though she'd immediately taken her mother's side and stuck there, it was unnatural and made us all sad.

The kitchen was, of course, beautifully done, with counters of blue and white tile, brass fixtures, and an antique stove. Sahara sat by the sink, turned to show her fine African profile. After everyone had gone and there was no one to see, Sahara would be given the plates to lick, but this was a secret and Sahara could keep a secret.

Jocelyn was rinsing the glasses. The water in town was so hard that they got scratched if they were put in the dishwasher, and therefore had to be done by hand.

“Dead woman walking,” Sylvia said. “You know how Daniel used to drive me crazy? It turns out I was very happily married. For thirty-two years. I miss him like my heart has been torn from my chest. What are the odds?”

Jocelyn put down a glass and took Sylvia's cold hands in her own slippery, soapy ones. “I've been very happily unmarried all those same years. Everything is going to be all right.” It was occurring to her for the first time that she was losing Daniel, too. She'd handed him over, but she'd never given him up. Now, while she was breeding her dogs and dusting her lightbulbs and reading her books, he had packed his bags and moved away. “I love you very much,” she told Sylvia.

“How could I have let myself forget that most marriages end in divorce?” Sylvia asked. “You don't learn that in Austen. She always has a wedding or two at the end.”

Allegra, Prudie, and Bernadette appeared as she spoke, carrying their coffee cups, napkins, plates. There was something, perhaps created by Sylvia's words, of the bridal procession about it. The way the golden light reflected in the windows. The silence of the fog outside. The women coming, one after another, into the kitchen, with their dirty dishes held before them, until we were all gathered together.

“Le monde est le livre des femmes,”
Prudie offered.

Whatever that meant. We could still see her lips, so she might have been perfectly serious, unless it was more of her ironic wit. Either way, we could think of no polite response.

“My dearest, most beloved Sylvia,” Jocelyn said. A tiny, ladylike drop of drool plinked from Sahara's mouth to the stone floor. Our forks and spoons slid under the foam of soap in the sink. Allegra put her arms around her mother and her head on her mother's shoulder. “We haven't come to the end yet.”

Jocelyn explains the dog show:

The judge generally begins by asking all handlers to gait their dogs around the edge of the ring and then stack them in a line along one side. As the dogs move, the judge stands in the center, assessing grace, balance, soundness.

When the dogs are stacked—a pose designed to display the dog to best advantage—the judge conducts a hands-on examination of the bite, depth of chest, spring of ribs, shoulder angulation, coat, and body condition. On males, the judge manually confirms two testicles.

After this, the handlers gait their dogs again, each in turn now, first moving away so the judge can evaluate from
behind, then coming back so the judge can see from the front. The judge watches for movement faults: Does the dog move true, or do his feet cross over? Is his stride free or tight, easy or restricted? In the final stages, the judge may ask competing handlers to gait two at a time so a direct comparison can be made, before selecting a winner.

The dog show emphasizes bloodline, appearance, and comportment, but money and breeding are never far from anyone's mind.

in which we read
Sense and Sensibility
with Allegra

A
partial list of things not found in the books of Jane Austen:

locked-room murders
punishing kisses
girls dressed up as boys (and rarely the reverse)
spies
serial killers
cloaks of invisibility
Jungian archetypes, most regrettably, doppelgängers
cats

But let's not focus on the negative.

“I don't think there's anything better in all of Austen than
those pages where Fanny Dashwood persuades her husband, step by step by step, not to give his stepmother and sisters any money,” Bernadette said. She repeated the same point in a variety of unilluminating ways while Allegra listened to the soft percussion of rain on the roof, the windows, and the deck. Bernadette was dressed today in something resembling desert robes, only periwinkle blue. Her hair had been cut, which left it less scope for improvisation, and she looked very nice, which was all the more remarkable for being a bit of magic done without mirrors.

It was cold out, and wet, the way it gets in April just when you've convinced yourself that spring is here. Winter's last laugh. The book club was circled about the woodstove in Sylvia's huge living room, with the stove door open and the flames wrapped tight about the logs. Overhead, a hundred bird's-eyes in the high bird's-eye-maple ceiling looked down on the little gathering.

Allegra's elbow often ached when it rained, and she rubbed it without noticing she was doing so until she saw her mother look at her, which made her stop and think of something diverting to say. “I like a progression,” she agreed. “Repetition is tedious”—this aimed at Bernadette, but Allegra wouldn't have said it if Bernadette had been likely to get it—“because there's no direction to it. I especially like a progression that turns things completely over. Takes you pole to pole.”

Allegra was a creature of extremes—either stuffed or starving, freezing or boiling, exhausted or electric with energy. She'd moved back home the month before, when her father had moved out. Jocelyn looked at Allegra approvingly. She was a very good daughter. Sylvia would have been very lonely there without her.

No one could be lonely with Allegra in the house. Such a vivacious presence, her company must be a great comfort. Except that—really Jocelyn didn't wish to even be thinking this—
Allegra, well, she felt things very deeply. It was one of her delightful qualities; she wept with those who wept.

Sylvia's boys could be very comforting, too, especially Diego. Andy couldn't manage a sustained sympathy, though he was good for an hour or two. It was too bad Diego couldn't come. Of course, he couldn't; he had a job and his family. But Diego would have cheered Sylvia up. While Allegra sometimes felt things so deeply you ended up consoling her even when the tragedy was entirely your own.

Jocelyn imagined Sylvia compelled to put a good face on things for Allegra's sake. To have to appear happy when she was so miserable. Who would require it? She imagined Sylvia making Allegra soups and running her baths, Allegra collapsed on the couch, tucked up in shawls and plied with tea. Really, it seemed too much, that Sylvia should be caring for Allegra at such a time. A surreptitious look at the CD cases scattered about the player told Jocelyn that someone had been indulging in a good wallow, and this someone was not Sylvia, not unless she'd developed a sudden taste for Fiona Apple. How could Allegra be so selfish?

But then, she'd always been a difficult child. Beautiful, beyond a doubt. She had Sylvia's dark eyes and Daniel's bright hair, her face the best possible combination of the two, her figure like Sylvia's, but sexier. Yet none of her parents' steadiness or placidity. When happy, she was uncontrollable, when sad, inconsolable, until she changed—fast as a finger snap—long after you'd given up. Sylvia had a repertoire of tricks that had worked on the boys when they were little. “If you were a dog I'd cheer you up by rubbing you behind your ears,” she'd say, rubbing as described. “If you were a cat, I'd scratch under your chin,” scratching. “If you were a horse, I'd pet your nose. If you were a bird, I'd stroke your stomach”—doing so—“but since”—quickly lifting his shirt—
“you're a boy”—she would blow wet, loud blasts of air onto his belly until he was gasping with laughter. This same scene would send Allegra into a fury.

One day when she was four years old, while leafing through Sylvia's beauty magazines, Allegra had taken offense at how much white space she found. “I don't like white,” she'd said. “It's so plain.” She burst into tears. “It's so plain and there's so much of it.” She sat for more than an hour, sobbing, working her way through the pages, coloring in the whites of people's eyes, their teeth, the spaces between paragraphs, the frames around ads. She was sobbing because she could see that she would never be done; her whole life would be used up in the hopeless, endless task of amending this single lapse in taste. She would grow old, and there would still be white sheets, white walls, her own white hair.

W
hite snow. “The whole beginning sequence has something of the fairy tale about it,” Grigg said. “With a lovely twist. Once upon a time, after the death of her beloved husband, a gentle stepmother was forced to live in a house ruled by her wicked stepdaughter.”

Allegra was sort of our hostess this month, but it was Sylvia's house and Sylvia's food, so it was sort of Sylvia. In this role, whatever role this was, Sylvia was determined to treat Grigg well today. He'd been the last to arrive, which had made her wonder whether he was coming, and therefore all the more pleased when he showed. Bernadette would never forgive them if he left early again. He had just made a very interesting point.

“Such an interesting point,” said Sylvia. “In fact, in a society where money passes to the eldest son, this can't have been an unusual case? But how often does it appear in books? The problems of older women don't interest most writers. Trust Miss Austen!”

“But the book isn't really so much about Mrs. Dashwood as about the young, beautiful daughters,” Prudie pointed out. She had come straight from a meeting of the teachers' union and was, therefore, uncommonly lipsticked and politicized. Her eyebrows had grown back in a bit, or else she'd painted over the deficiency; that was a relief, but the voice she was using was a public-speaking voice and that was an aggravation. It was, Sylvia supposed, an occupational hazard, more to be pitied, and so on. Her articulation would surely become more normal as the evening progressed. “Once it actually gets going. Colonel Brandon's not much younger than Mrs. Dashwood, but he falls in love with her youngest daughter, never her. An older man can still fall in love. An older woman better not.”

Prudie had spoken without thinking, but the thinking came rapidly behind. What a faux pas she'd just made, though, in justice, she felt that she wasn't the sort who often stumbled that way. Of course, this only made it more obvious when she did. Rumor had it that Daniel was seeing someone, had, in fact, left Sylvia not because the marriage had gone bad, but because he'd been hit by the thunderbolt. Prudie looked for something to add that would make it clear she hadn't been speaking of Sylvia, though, honestly, not that Sylvia wasn't attractive enough for her age, but what could her prospects be at fifty-whatever?

“Not,” Prudie said, but Bernadette had spoken at the same time and Bernadette was the one who carried through. Bernadette was the one who carried on. The rain ticked off the time while she spoke. The fire turned from blue to orange, pole to pole. The log in the stove fell.

Bernadette was capable of speaking and enjoying the stillness of the scene at the same time. Nothing disturbed her peace less than the sound of her own voice. Sylvia's house was so much quieter than Jocelyn's. Sylvia lived downtown, near campus but
back from the street, directly behind the Phi Beta Pi sorority, unless it was the Pi Beta Phi. This was a hidden, tranquil location, except during rush, when the girls gathered on the lawn for a week, singing, “I want to be a Phi Beta Pi [or the other], boom, boom,” like sirens to sailors. Of course, the club wouldn't have met here if it had been rush week. If Daniel had moved out during rush week, Bernadette would have completely understood. Jocelyn had told her that Daniel was seeing someone young enough to be his sister.

J
ocelyn knew how a child felt when her father decamped. But surely it was different when the child was grown-up and had a place of her own. Allegra had every right to miss her father, just not the way Sylvia did. Sylvia was daily deserted; Allegra had merely had her Christmases spoiled. From now on there would be no place to come where she felt entirely at home. Her holidays would be split down the middle, like a grapefruit.

December was still months away, but Jocelyn knew enough about Allegra to guess that she'd already thought of it. Christmas had always been such a big deal to her. As a child she'd spent the days leading up to it sick with apprehension, so afraid that she wouldn't like her gifts, that the wishes closest to her heart would go unattended. She would cry herself to sleep at night, anticipating her disappointment. By Christmas morning she'd have the whole family exhausted and peevish.

In fact, her requests were never difficult or expensive, and there was no reason not to indulge them. From the moment the actual getting began, Allegra was wild with delight. She loved surprises and ripped her presents open, with cries of joy for whatever was inside. “For me?” she'd ask, as if it were too much to believe. “More for me?”

Every year she'd be given a sum of money with which to buy presents as well, and she spent it thoughtfully, but it never went far enough. So she added things that she'd made, drawings for her brothers and books of stapled pictures for her parents and Jocelyn. Ashtrays and ornaments. Stones and pine cones painted with glitter. Bookends and calendars. As she grew older these handmade gifts outstripped the store-bought ones. She was not—she was quite insistent on this point—an artist. But she was clever. Her father taught her to use power tools, and she opted for shop in high school rather than the cooking class. By then she was designing furniture and jewelry. The glass-top coffee table on which Jocelyn had just set her purse was something Allegra had made back then, and it was as nice as anything you saw anywhere.

Now she sold her things in stores, online, and at craft fairs. Her current project was to collect damaged jewelry at flea markets, dinged beads and bad cameos, and crush them, pressing the resulting bits into fish-scale mosaics. Sylvia was wearing a new bracelet made of mismatched earrings caught together in a delicate chain. It was a great deal prettier than it sounded, and showed that Allegra's heart, as always, was in the right place. The year before this she'd joined a caroling group in San Francisco and spent her Christmas Eve singing second soprano in a round of hospitals and nursing homes. Sylvia had a picture of her on the mantel, wearing a purple robe and carrying a lit candle. A silver frame of Allegra's own making. A madonna with fire-bright cheeks, eyes like mirrors.

A
usten's minor characters are really wonderful,” said Grigg. “Good as Dickens's.” Sylvia was very glad to have Grigg speaking right up this way. She wouldn't have taken issue for the
world, and anyway, what was there to possibly take issue with? There were authors whose names she didn't like to use in the same sentence with Austen's, but Dickens had written some very good books in his day. Especially
David Copperfield.

“And speaking of Dickens,” Grigg said—were they never to be done speaking of Dickens!—“I was trying to think of contemporary writers who devote that same care to the secondary characters, and it occurred to me that it's a common sitcom device. You can just imagine how today Austen would be writing ‘The Elinor Show,' with Elinor as the solid moral center and the others stumbling into and out of her New York apartment with their wacky lives.”

Sylvia could imagine no such thing. It was all very well to point out fairy-tale themes in Austen; Sylvia had done this herself.
Pride and Prejudice
as “Beauty and the Beast.”
Persuasion
as “Cinderella,” et cetera, et cetera. It was even all right to suggest that Dickens also did well what Austen did superbly. But “The Elinor Show”!
She did not think so.
What a waste those eyelashes were on a man who watched sitcoms.

Even Bernadette was silent with disapproval. The rain drummed on the roof, the fire sputtered. The women looked at their hands or at the fire, but
not
at one another. It was Allegra who finally spoke. “Good as the secondary characters are, I do think Austen gets better at them in her later books. The women—Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer, and that other one—are kind of a mishmash. Hard to keep straight. And I loved Mr. Palmer's acid tongue, but then he reforms and disappears very disappointingly.”

In fact, Allegra had instantly recognized herself in the sour Mr. Palmer. She, too, often thought of sharp things to say, and she said them more often than she wished. Mr. Palmer didn't suffer fools and neither did Allegra, but it wasn't something she was
proud of. It didn't spring, as Austen suggested, from the desire to appear superior, unless lack of patience was a superior quality. “Plus”—Allegra allowed herself one more moment's irritation over the silencing of Mr. Palmer—“I do think
Sense and Sensibility
stretches our credulity at the end. I mean, the sudden marriage of Robert Ferrars and Lucy Steele! The later books are more smoothly plotted.”